Burry has been working on the construction of Gaudí’s cathedral since 1979 and has been instrumental in the development of the project over the last 30 years, steering it through some once-unimaginable technological advances. He is the only person working on the project today who has used both the traditional manual architectural drawing of plans as well as digital computation techniques. In 2004, the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi awarded Burry the prestigious ‘Diploma i la insignia a l’acadèmic corresponent’ and given the title ‘Il·lustrisim Senyor’, in recognition of his work on this important Catalan landmark.
It was as an architecture student at Cambridge in the late Seventies that Burry came to visit the Sagrada Família as part of the research for his final thesis. When he met with the two then-directors, he had two questions for them, “In the absence of the Master, where was the authority to finish the building coming from?” and “How do you communicate to the builders the intricacies of such complex masonry?”, pointing to the much-lamented fact that there is very little material left regarding the cathedral’s construction from Gaudí himself and nothing approaching a traditional set of blueprints.
The directors, both in their late 80s at this time, had been enthusiastic supporters of Gaudí during his lifetime, attending some of his many lectures about his design for the Sagrada Família. They were also part of the restoration effort to repair the damage caused to the building during the Spanish Civil War, in which anarchists destroyed almost all of Gaudí’s drawings and many of the models. Despite these setbacks, the directors were able to explain to Burry that, contrary to the belief that Gaudí’s designs were without regular forms, they were instead based on complex geometries. “I was invited [to be] an architect researcher,” remembered Burry and the directors explained the task to him as “using this geometry”, which he would have to uncover by reverse engineering the remaining models, manually at that point.
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