Sagrada Família (Gaudí)

Thinking Through Alfred Gell (1945-1997)’s “Art and Agency” and “The Technology of Enchantment”

The Agency of Living Form

Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família is not a cathedral in the conventional sense—it is a biological cathedral, a structure that breathes, grows, mutates. In Gellian terms, this is an agent-object, so rich in intentional complexity that it functions as a quasi-person: an enchanted organism situated in Barcelona, yet woven into the temporal tissue of cosmic unfolding.

In Art and Agency, Gell introduces the idea that art objects serve as “indexes”—they are not mere symbols, but extensions of persons, imbued with intentionality. Sagrada Família is an ultimate index—not of a single person, but of divine cosmogenesis, filtered through Gaudí’s visionary techniques. Its spiraling towers, vegetal vaults, and fractal geometries encode biological, metaphysical, and theological intentionalities.

Architecture as Enchanted Technology

Gaudí didn’t design static forms. He built with what Gell would call “technologies of enchantment”: formal systems that engage the mind not through representation, but through overwhelming affective complexity. The parabolic arches and hyperbolic vaults of the basilica are not just feats of engineering—they are spellwork in stone, eluding total comprehension. They do not merely signify sacredness; they make sacredness physically experienceable.

In this sense, Sagrada Família casts a spell. Its enchantment emerges from the simultaneity of mathematical order and divine organicism—a logic that dances between rationalist calculus and ecstatic mysticism. The viewer becomes a devotee not just of faith, but of form.

Distributed Personhood and Eternal Becoming

Gell’s idea of distributed personhood finds a literal embodiment here: though Gaudí died in 1926, his agency lives on, distributed across generations of architects, sculptors, masons, and algorithms continuing his project. This building has no terminal point—and in Gellian terms, this becomes essential to its magical efficacy.

The never-ending construction signifies more than delay. It embodies Christian eschatology—architecture as anticipation of the eternal. The building acts upon us not because it is complete, but because it never can be.