This church has been under construction for 124 years. In 2026, it will become the tallest in the world.

It isn't funded by the state or even the Church — it's being built entirely by the people.

And it's far more impressive than you realize

Barcelona's Sagrada Familia is proof that intergenerational construction is still alive. When complete, it will be the world's second tallest religious building of any kind.

142 years ago, it existed only in the mind of Antoni Gaudí — Spain's most visionary architect.

Nobody had seen his strange mix of Gothic and Art Nouveau before. Gaudí saw natural beauty as a gift from God, and made this the blueprint of his work.

He was searching for the origins of beauty in natural creation.

 Nature is everywhere in the Sagrada Familia, his magnum opus —

the ceiling is like a giant forest canopy and structures resembling rib cages bind the exterior.

The Nativity façade, for example, is an ode to the wonder of nature and life. Mary, Jesus and the saints are surrounded by lush carvings of plants and animals.

Gaudí combined these organic forms with the key principle of Gothic architecture: that light itself is divine and should be maximized inside.

He was an artist painting with light...

But how does something so irregular-looking stand upright? 

He had this genius idea: hanging weights on strings will form arches that spread their weight optimally under gravity.

Turn this upside down and you have the most structurally-sound arch or dome shapes possible.

Gaudí was so far ahead of his time that he planned a multi-generational build so technology could later catch up, making the design possible. At first, on a tight budget, they had little better equipment than medieval builders did: wooden cranes and scaffolding.

And though it might look random and organic, every inch is intentional and packed with symbolism. There are 18 towers: 12 represent the apostles, four the evangelists, one for the Virgin Mary...

and the last one, the tallest in the middle, represents Jesus Christ.

And look at the garden of fruits atop the pinnacles. They represent the fruit of good deeds, even arranged by the seasons in which they grow. Grapes and shafts of wheat symbolize the Eucharist

Over time, Gaudí became more and more devoted to the build and to his faith — rejecting all other work and making the construction site his permanent home.

"My client is not in a hurry" he famously replied when asked why it would take so long...

Before there was computational analysis, Gaudí realized nature was bound by the laws of mathematics — and forms that mimic nature are structurally sound.

Attention to detail like Gaudí's has probably never been attempted at such scale. There are painstaking carvings high up that perhaps nobody will see again once the scaffolding comes down, just like medieval gargoyles.

Maybe that's the secret to great art — art made only for the eye of God. That was the spirit that built the Gothic wonders of the Middle Ages, and lives on today through Gaudí's dreamlike vision...