Which 3D printed Sagrada Familia is more Gaudi?

Last weekend I was looking like the consummate imbecile spinning around trying to take a 360 photo for my Gear VR headset inside the Sagrada Familia on a city break to Barcelona. The result is pretty shabby - lots of floating heads and a starting position in front of building work - it doesn't do Antoni Gaudi's magnificent vision any justice.

The same cannot be said for this incredible work by artist Cornelia Kuglmeier, who has painstakingly recreated Gaudi's vision of the largest Catholic Church on the globe using just a 3Doodler 3D printing pen, some filament and some serious hours. 

Cornelia painstakingly researched Gaudi's original plans, which, thanks to vandals and the Spanish civil war are fairly difficult to come by. She then created stencils to begin her doodling.

Using in excess of 1,050 strands of plastic and working on the model for up to ten hours a day Cornelia at least got to see her model finished. Unlike Gaudi, who died in a streetcar accident some 100 years before the Sagrada Familia is scheduled to be finished.

Professional Doodling

The 3Doodler has many pretenders to its crown but thanks to the company's dedication to giving the community what they want it has developed a brand loyalty that is seldom seen in the world of 3D printing.

The company recently launched the 3Doodler Pro, a $249 version of the 3D printing pen, which is designed to elevate the pen beyond its traditionally arts and craft user base.

As its name suggests it is aimed at professionals like Cornelia (although for this project she used a 3Doodler Create), and gives the user greater control over functions like drive speed and temperature to draw in a number of different materials including metal and wood composites. 3Doodler hope these enhancements will appeal to engineers, designers, and architects...

During my tour of the Sagrada Familia last weekend I came across the model shop, in which the team at Sagrada Familia studio are creating models in order to help with the final construction. In that room are two 3D Systems ProJet CJP 3D printers (formerly Z Corp machinery). 

In 3D Systems' press release at the time of purchase lead architect on the Sagrada project, Jordi Coll said, “If Gaudí was alive today, he would have brought 3D technology to its maximum exponent, since much of his work was already conceived tri-dimensionally.” 

Much of Gaudi's work was so ahead of its time that technology was not able to recreate his concepts - this is one of the reasons that he would never see his grandest vision completed, not that it bothered him, famously quipping when asked about the lengthy construction process of the place of worship: "My client is not in a rush".

The towers for the Sagrada were designed using his upside-down hanging model technique in order to create the exact curve he wanted. Gaudi wanted to replicate organic structures as much as possible and this technique using strings and weights gave ulitmate design freedom. With 3D printing's ability to create complex internal structures he would have been able to visualise this much quicker although had the technology been around we may not have seen such beautiful visualisations of architecture as the hanging models. 

Undoubtedly Gaudi would have enjoyed the speed and the ability to create complex objects that industrial 3D printing offers but perhaps not its clinicalness. If you take a look at Cornelia's 3Doodled model and the 3D printed one side-by-side one is clearly more Gaudiesque than the other...