A Model Restoration

Glancing at Barcelona's still-unfinished Sagrada Família Roman Catholic basilica, with its famous sandcastle-like exterior, it is easy to get the wrong idea about its architect, Antoni Gaudí, as a carefree, loosey-goosey artist. The whimsical exterior hides a geometrically sophisticated, structurally advanced design—a big part of the reason this grand basilica, begun in 1882, has taken so many decades to build, remaining the world's longest-running ongoing architectural project.

This complexity required an utterly different approach to modeling than what architects had typically deployed. Instead of using two-dimensional drawings to guide builders, Gaudí relied heavily on large, high-fidelity plaster models—models that needed to be reverse engineered and rebuilt after extensive damage during the Spanish Civil War. In a separate project, Gaudí pioneered the use of hanging-chain models that enable changes in real time; though he did not use these interactive models on the Sagrada Família, they guided his thinking and prefigured the so-called parametric design software that has been instrumental to the acceleration of the project's pace in recent years.