Never Finished In A Lifetime

On the 20th of February this year, the last section of the Tower of Jesus Christ was lifted into place in Barcelona. 172.5 metres. The world's tallest church. Construction began in 1882. It is still not finished: the tower is done, the Glory façade it was meant to crown is not.

I first went in my first year of architecture school, sketching the facade half cut on cheap sangria and mojitos. Then again a few years later.

Then, halfway up a hill in Sumbawa, Indonesia, in 2023, I got a notification that my card had been used to book three tours there.

I thought that was quite cultured of the thief. Taking the family too. I got my money back. Three visits across fifteen years - one of them theoretical - and it was unfinished every single time. It's hard to imagine it without scaffolding and construction noise.

Antoni Gaudí was struck by a tram in 1926, aged 73, on his way to the site. He died three days later. At that point less than a quarter of it was built. The rest was completed by people working from drawings, photographs, and models reconstructed after the Spanish Civil War destroyed the originals. What stands now is partly Gaudí, partly an interpretation of Gaudí, and partly something no one in 1883 had the tools to imagine. Whether that makes it more or less his is a question the building doesn't answer.

About a year ago I went to the Sanctuary of Truth in Pattaya. It doesn't read as something built in 1981. It reads as something that came up slowly out of the ground, the way old things do when they've had enough weather. 105 metres of hand-carved timber, no nails, begun by a man named Lek Viriyaphan who decided the world needed a monument in wood to Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Still unfinished. The takien post at the centre is expected to last 600 years. Lek Viriyaphan died before it was done. They're still carving.

One in stone, one in wood. The same argument.

A new project kicked off this week. Second baby coming in September. My son asks a lot of questions on the school run. I haven't been thinking about architecture particularly, but I have been thinking about the long game - what I'm building, how long it takes, whether I'll see it done.

There's a version of the future where it all comes together and a version where it doesn't, and you can't always tell from the inside which one you're in.

Gaudí couldn't. Lek Viriyaphan couldn't. You keep building anyway.

What's the one project you're working on that you hope to see finished? Reply and let me know!

See you next week,
Danny