On a recent trip to Spain, we made the pilgrimage to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s yet to be completed cathedral for the workers in Barcelona. You may have seen pictures of this iconic structure but in my experience, they do little justice to the scale or Gaudi’s vision. Even if you find this structure challenging to your taste, and some have suggested very strong objections to the melting wax façade, and the unconventional symbolism, you cannot deny that it is a fantastic undertaking. The engineering alone is awe inspiring, something that can only be appreciated fully from the inside out.

The cathedral sits adjacent to a meager, scruffy park which on the dreary day we visited was crowded with pickpockets and clumps of tourists following their guides' upraised umbrellas and selfie sticks. The neighborhood itself is far from an ideal setting for this amazing work. It is a working-class community and the surrounding buildings are pedestrian, bordering on plain ugly, lacking the charm of Barcelona’s grand Avenidas. We are used to seeing monumental works against a backdrop of serenity and grandeur, or at least in a setting that lets us appreciate their singularity, but that was not the commission. Gaudi took over a project begun under another architect. It was a perfectly modest design, uninspired, but in keeping with its surroundings. The trade workers whose contributions were to pay for this undertaking had no plans to build anything terribly grand.

Gaudi highjacked the plan. He envisioned something so far beyond the modest intentions of his predecessor as to defy judgement. There are those who say that Gaudi was mad and they have a point. His buildings, his works are to this day polarizing not only among students of architecture but the citizens of Barcelona themselves. It has been described as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world” and “one of the strangest serious buildings” as well as “whimsical, spiritual, sensual, and exuberant”.

Ninety-two years following his death, the Sagrada Familia remains just seventy percent complete, having been under construction for a total of 136 years including those when work was halted during the Spanish Civil War. Gaudi knew from the outset that he would not live to see his vision completed. He is said to have remarked, “my client is not in a hurry”, when asked about the progress of construction, yet Gaudi left models, plans and methodic construction artifacts to guide work that he knew he would never see realized.

Whether you view the Sagrada as vulgar or divine a glorious vision or the work of a mad, self-absorbed obsessive is a matter of perspective. I lean toward madness, but not perhaps in the usual sense. I find the sheer audacity of Gaudi a challenge to sensibility. He startles us and causes division. His works demand that we take sides; there is no safe middle ground we have to stand on. Some would say that all artists are a bit mad, that creativity itself demands a departure from the ordinary. It’s a safe if trite observation about those who choose to move beyond the comfort of accepted conventions. But Gaudi was not a madman—his work cannot be relegated to the triviality of an amusement park. His madness was his commitment to a creation so visceral and divisive that it compels us to question.

At the risk of offending, too many of the artistic and architectural achievements that we flock to see leave me cold. I admire the craftsmanship, the evolution of ideas and the sheer scale of some works but I am unchallenged by their statement. Gaudi leaves me troubled but he leaves me wondering and that I believe is the legacy of this monument. What is it to be mad, to boil, bristle, flare and fume; to simmer and smolder, burn and ferment, just a few of the words we use to describe madness? In that cauldron of volatility, the dross is burned away. Conventionality and complacence cannot survive. I believe most of us have a spark of madness within us; an ember of desire to be a part of something greater than ourselves, to question our very purpose and existence. I have been to more contemplative, peaceful places and certainly to places of undeniable beauty but this one remains with me singular and alone, a symbol of humanity’s yearning.