Gaudí and the stained glass windows of the Sagrada Familia

Returning to the importance of this achievement of design and technique, which, under the influence of an exceptional art, the Gothic, extended, for the history of Western architecture, the knowledge of light and its multiple applications, both in religious buildings, as in civil buildings, I would like to invite you, on this occasion, to a brief walk through the windows of a very special universe: the universe of Antonio Gaudí and the windows of his masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia.

With the exception of some cathedrals, such as that of León, which still preserves a good part of its original stained glass windows, made, it is assumed, with the dark and at the same time cryptic procedures of Alchemy, we possibly have in the work and in the technique of Antonio Gaudí, the best and most accurate approach to that special treatment of glass, whose spectacular sublimation reached tremendously effective levels, whose truly surprising sifting managed to suggest metaphysical spaces, which acted on the viewer's unconscious and in many cases, for Crazy as such a statement may seem, they created altered states of consciousness, very similar to those that were originally experienced in the lavish Gothic cathedrals.

Gaudí, like many other enlightened men, was also a student of the Laws of Nature: a profound observer, who applied to himself the fundamental law that absolutely nothing obeys the simplicity of chance, as demonstrated by the calculated and complex experiments that he carried out in his studio, where nothing was ruled out, however inconsequential or improbable that his study and implementation might seem a priori.

Perhaps for this reason and also because he was a 'navigator of light and space', metaphorically speaking, his prodigious architecture highlights, mainly, the allegorical inclusion of subversive elements, charged with a powerful archetypal force and by default, heterodox, which in multiple times transcends the observer's reading, suggesting explanations, unconventional or unconventional, according to his genius, which was not at all unconventional.

Based on this consideration, we can suggest that entering a place like the Sagrada Familia -also known, with the significant name of 'the cathedral of the poor'- is a complex immersion in those worlds of transition, where the human being or, rather, where the consciousness of the human being is profoundly altered by that immemorial duel between Light and Darkness, to whose no man's land or purgatory, he has unequivocally submitted.

And where, of course, as fundamental pieces of this monumental ensemble, which not only surprises due to the inexhaustible strength and mastery of its design, the light, subjected through its stained glass windows to a refraction that is not harmful to the retina, undoubtedly provides, one of the most remarkable experiences in a visit to an extraordinary place of worship, which, one hundred years after the foundation stone was laid, is still unfinished.

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