I hope someday the church becomes just a little more practical. It’s a monstrosity from my chair. I’m sure it’s superb....just wasteful.
gaudy: adj gaudier, gaudiest
gay, bright, or colourful in a crude or vulgar manner; garish
It’s actually very beautiful - or I suppose, could be depending on what they do with the interior. The outside has carvings of different scenes related to the Holy Family (the Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, etc.) and the little details in the carving are wonderful. If you go up into the towers and out onto the roof, you see that it is all designed as a mass of foliage, and there are porcelain birds nesting in the stone tracery here and there.
Gaudi died without completing the designs and in fact before they completed even the part he had designed. There has been some controversy over the sculptor hired to finish some parts (I think he’s awful, personally, creator of those faceless religious statues that were so popular post Vatican II), but the basic Gaudi part is not a waste at all.
Another thing to remember is that Gaudi was designing for the pre-Vatican II Church, which understood splendor, beauty and faith, and not for its dreary, utilitarian and barely believing post-Vatican II version.
Was Solomon's Temple wasteful?
If God is Beauty, shouldn't his House be beautiful?
There's an old saying that skimping on a church is stealing from the poor.