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Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia
Watercolour and crayon
©2013 Charlene Brown
In designing the Sagrada
Familia, Gaudí wanted something much more soaring than could be
achieved with Roman arches but considered the Gothic style imperfect because it
needs buttresses to counteract the outward pressure on the perpendicular walls.
Believing that “the House of God should stand on its own,” Gaudí designed this Barcelona cathedral with
paraboloid spires and vaults. In fact,
he frequently found solutions in natural forms, in helicoids as well
as elliptic and hyperbolic paraboloids, and he
made use of fractals, structures that split into smaller replications of
themselves.
According to ChrisGuillebeau, the
perfect introduction to a book often comes late in the writing process... You
shouldn’t think you can’t really start until you’ve worked out a complete
outline and written the introduction. He says you should start with what you
know best. Work on that. Then work on something else… whatever you have to do,
just keep going.
This is how I’m
approaching my next book – a collection of blog posts relating to both art and
science –with the working title ‘The Fine Art of Physics’… and when I saw
Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia during a brief stop in Barcelona this summer, I decided
to try to fit it into the book.
Somewhere. I don’t yet know if it
will go in a chapter on the history of parallel developments and crossovers in
the arts and sciences, or a chapter that’s just about architecture, or maybe it
should be mentioned in discussing the role of fractals in visualizing
multi-dimensionality…
Which brings me to
another point Chris Guillebeau stresses… When you work from the middle
indefinitely, a manuscript will become disjointed, and it requires some effort
to stitch it all together. Before too
long, I will draw up an outline, and begin at the beginning.
