The first time I stood inside the Sagrada Família, I didn’t look up at the famous tree columns. I looked sideways, at a museum case in the crypt where someone had set up a working replica of an upside-down hanging model. Tiny weighted bags dangled from a horizontal frame, connected by string, sketching out the shape of a future church in mid-air. A mirror beneath them flipped the picture right-side up. That is when it clicked. Most architects begin with a drawing. Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) had begun with gravity.
I walked into Barcelona expecting the buildings. I walked out thinking about the notebooks.
This article is about those notebooks – and, more honestly, about what is left of them. Most of Gaudí’s working papers burned in 1936 when his studio inside the unfinished Sagrada Família was torched during the Spanish Civil War. By some estimates, over 6,000 items were destroyed. Only one complete notebook survives. It is called the Manuscrit de Reus, written between 1873 and 1878, and it now sits in a museum in his hometown of Reus, Catalonia.
What that lost archive, that one surviving notebook, and Gaudí’s three-dimensional “notes” of plaster and string have taught me are eight lessons about designing a life on paper. None require a degree in architecture. All of them sit inside the journaling habits of successful people I keep coming back to.
1. Treat a Notebook as the Place You Actually Think
According to legend, when Gaudí graduated from the Barcelona School for Architecture in 1878, his teacher Elias Rogent looked at his odd, unfinished drawings and said:
We have given this academic title either to a fool or a genius. Time will show.
Source: César Martinell, Gaudí: His Life, His Theories, His Work (MIT Press, 1975), as quoted in primary materials on the Manuscrit de Reus.
The strange thing about reading the Manuscrit de Reus today is that you can see, page by page, a young man deciding which one he is going to be. He fills the notebook with sketches, calculations, diary-style notes, and original essays. He works out a theory of ornamentation in his early twenties. He is not recording finished thoughts. He is using the paper to figure out what he believes.
When I first started journaling seriously, I treated the page as a place to summarize conclusions I had already reached in my head. The Manuscrit de Reus is the opposite. The page is the studio, not the press release.
The same instinct shows up in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks – the original visual journals. Four centuries apart, in different languages, working on radically different problems, both men reached for the same tool when an idea refused to sit still in the head.
Try this tonight: pick one decision you have been turning over for weeks. Write it at the top of a fresh page in a single sentence. Then write for fifteen minutes without trying to be smart. Let the paper carry the thinking instead of your skull.
2. Notes Are Ideas, Not Blueprints
The most striking thing about Gaudí’s sketches is how loosely they correspond to the finished buildings. He never treated a drawing as a contract.
Casa Milà, the apartment block on Passeig de Gràcia that locals call La Pedrera, is a good example. The original facade drawing shows a four-armed cross in one corner that was never built. The chimneys and stair towers, now the most recognizable elements of the roof, do not appear on the drawing at all. As art historian Mireia Freixa puts it:
As was common in Gaudí, the original design of the facade does not correspond to the one finally built.
Source: “The Beginnings of the Building. The Drawing Plans of La Pedrera-Casa Milà, 1906,” La Pedrera official archive.
The same pattern shows up in his first sketch of the apse and towers of the Sagrada Família. The drawing is restrained, almost conservative. The building that emerged was anything but. As George Collins and Juan Bassegoda Nonell write in The Designs and Drawings of Antonio Gaudí, his drawings “often bear an ambiguous relationship to the building as it stands.”
I find this oddly reassuring. Most of us write a goal in a notebook, look at it three months later, and feel guilty that we are not living the version we drafted. Gaudí treated his notes as starting positions, not commitments. The notebook is a first draft of a self. It is not supposed to be accurate yet.
3. Use Models, Not Just Words, as Notes
As his career progressed, Gaudí relied less on two-dimensional drawings and more on three-dimensional models. He built plaster studies he could walk around and squint at. He used the workers in his studio as figure models. He once bought an old donkey from a peddler and brought it into the studio so he could cast it for the Flight to Egypt on the facade of the Sagrada Família. When the animal refused to stand still, Gaudí suspended it in a sling under its belly. He recalled later:
When we found that it would not stand still to let us take the cast, I had it suspended, with a strap under its belly, and when it found itself in mid-air, it became completely calm and we were able to take the cast without difficulty.
Source: Joan Bergós and Marc Llimargas, Gaudí: The Man and His Work (Bulfinch, 1999), p. 39.
We do not usually think of a plaster cast or a swinging donkey as “notes.” Gaudí did. He used these objects the same way Feynman used scrap paper – as the place where the thinking actually happened, with plaster instead of pencil.
Most journalers default to words. There is nothing wrong with that. But Gaudí is a reminder that a journal is whatever container helps you see your own idea more clearly. For me, that has sometimes meant index cards laid out on the floor. Sometimes it has meant a voice memo recorded on a walk and later transcribed. Once, embarrassingly, it meant building a Lego version of an organizational chart on the kitchen table.
If your idea has a shape, words may not be the right note-taking tool – Picasso worked out whole paintings in sketchbooks rather than prose. Find the right medium for the thought.
4. Let Gravity Do the Math: Build a “Hanging Model” for Decisions
Gaudí’s most famous innovation was structural rather than ornamental. For the Colònia Güell church near Barcelona, he designed what he called a funicular model. He hung small bags of weighted shot from strings attached to a ceiling frame in his studio. Gravity naturally pulled each string into the optimal curve for a load-bearing arch. He then took a photograph, flipped it upside down, and sketched the church directly over the inverted image. The hanging shapes became the vaults of the building.
Architectural historian Santiago Huerta calls this “one of the most original contributions to structural design in the history of architecture.” Gaudí had let the laws of physics solve the problem before he picked up a pencil. He explained the underlying principle in a sentence I have carried around for years:
Architecture is the measuring and ordering of light.
Source: George R. Collins and Juan Bassegoda Nonell, The Designs and Drawings of Antonio Gaudí (Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 43.
What strikes me is that the funicular model is also a journaling lesson in disguise. Gaudí outsourced one specific decision to a force outside his head. Gravity gave him an honest answer he could not have invented from a chair.
The journaling version of this is something I have started doing on hard decisions. Instead of trying to reason the problem out in prose, I list the constraints first. What absolutely cannot move. What must be true at the end. Then I let the constraints “hang” together on the page and see what shape the answer naturally takes. Most of the time, the structure draws itself once the weights are honest. It is a smaller, paper version of Gaudí’s rig.
When I look at the equations and travel notes in Einstein’s journals, I see the same instinct. Einstein wasn’t filling the page with conclusions. He was letting the math hang from his constraints and waiting to see which shape held.
5. Write Down Your Working Principles, Even If No One Asks
On August 10, 1878, Gaudí opened the Manuscrit de Reus and announced that he intended to “study ornamentation seriously.” He wrote:
My goal is to make it interesting and intelligible.
Source: Martinell, Gaudí: His Life, His Theories, His Work, MIT Press, 1975.
What follows is a nine-point theory of ornamentation. He was twenty-six years old. He had no clients. He had no commissions of any size. He had no reason to systematize his thinking except that he wanted to know what he actually believed. His list, paraphrased lightly, reads like a designer’s personal manifesto:
- Ornament should evoke poetic ideas and act as motifs.
- Motifs come from history, nature, and geometry.
- Beautiful form contains nothing superfluous.
- Character is the criterion for ornament.
- Religious buildings demand grandiosity, not nostalgia.
- Great masses are themselves a form of ornament.
- Ornament is, and always will be, polychromatic.
- Ornament is the meter and rhythm of poetry.
- An object is beautiful only when it fulfills its purpose.
You do not need to be an architect to feel the pull of that last line. An object is beautiful only when it fulfills its purpose. It is a working principle Gaudí used to evaluate every building he ever designed. He wrote it down before he had a body of work to apply it to.
I think this is the part most of us skip. We have opinions. We have aesthetic preferences. We have a sense of how we want to live. We almost never sit down and write the principles out, numbered, on a page, in a notebook nobody else will read. Gaudí did that at twenty-six and spent the next fifty years building cathedrals around it.
Try this on a weekend: write a numbered list of your working principles for a single domain you care about – it helps to think first about how to structure a page that can hold them. Could be design. Could be parenting. Could be how you run a meeting. Aim for nine. The point is not to be original. The point is to know what you actually believe.
6. Let Form Grow From Meaning, Not the Other Way Around
Gaudí’s ninth principle – that beauty must fulfill purpose – quietly governs the other eight. He did not treat ornament as decoration applied to a finished building. He treated it as the natural overflow of the building’s meaning. The twisted columns inside the Sagrada Família are not stylistic flourishes. They lean and branch because they hold the roof up the way a tree holds up a canopy. They are structural and symbolic at the same time.
I have found this principle eerily useful for writing. There is a difference between a sentence that is pretty and a sentence that is doing work. Gaudí would say the first kind is ornament for ornament’s sake. The second kind is form grown from meaning. The first kind decorates a page. The second kind holds it up.
The same idea echoes through Susan Sontag’s notebooks, where she fights herself to write less prettily and more precisely. And it shows up in Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon notebooks, where each rhetorical turn is doing the structural work of the argument. King’s repetitions are columns. They carry weight.
If your journal entries are starting to sound too polished, ask Gaudí’s question of each paragraph. Is this ornament fulfilling a purpose, or is it just decoration? Cut the decoration. Keep the columns.
7. Plan in Public, Build in Public, Die Unfinished
Here is the part of Gaudí’s story I cannot stop thinking about. He died in 1926, hit by a tram on his way to evening prayers, mistaken for a beggar because he was gaunt and poorly dressed. He was buried inside the Sagrada Família, which he knew he would never live to see finished. When someone once needled him about the building’s slow pace, he reportedly answered:
My client is not in a hurry.
Source: Bergós and Llimargas, Gaudí: The Man and His Work (Bulfinch, 1999), p. 36. (He meant God.)
A century after his death, the building is still under construction. UNESCO lists seven of his works as World Heritage Sites. The Sagrada Família was finally roofed in 2010 and is scheduled to be completed sometime in the 2030s, more than 150 years after construction began. The architects working on it today are reconstructing his intentions from the few surviving plaster fragments, photographs of the funicular models, and the Manuscrit de Reus.
What this tells me is that Gaudí planned for a project longer than his own life. He filled notebooks and built models for a building he would never enter. That kind of work requires a particular relationship with a journal. It is not a productivity log. It is a transmission to the future, written by hand, in the hope that someone will pick up where you left off.
I’m not building a basilica. Neither are you. But every parent, every business owner, every writer working on a long book is, in a smaller way, in the same position. Your notebook is one of the few tools that will outlive the version of you currently writing in it. That is worth taking seriously. Edison’s 3,500 notebooks survived him for the same reason. The page outlasts the person.
8. Mourn the Lost Notebooks, Then Start a New One
I want to come back to the fire.
In July 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, anti-clerical mobs broke into the crypt of the Sagrada Família and set Gaudí’s studio alight. Most of his papers, drawings, plaster models, and working notebooks were destroyed. Historians believe that more than 6,000 items were lost in a few days. Almost everything Gaudí wrote in his hand is gone.
The Manuscrit de Reus survived only because the architect Domènec Sugrañes, who took over the Sagrada Família after Gaudí’s death, had moved a handful of documents out of the temple to the museum in Reus some years before the war. César Martinell rediscovered it decades later while researching his biography of Gaudí. One notebook out of a life’s worth.
When I learned that, my first reaction was grief. Then it was something more interesting. The lesson of the lost archive is not that you should preserve every page you write. The lesson is that the act of writing was worth doing even though most of it would not survive. Gaudí kept filling notebooks for fifty years knowing that paper burns and donkeys move and clients die. He did the work on paper anyway.
This is the same instinct I have found in every famous journaler I have studied. Bruce Lee filled his notebooks with personal affirmations knowing many of them were private notes to a future self he might never become. Benjamin Franklin tracked his thirteen virtues on a chart he carried for decades, fully aware of how often he failed. The notebook is not insurance against loss. The notebook is the practice itself.
So mourn the lost archive. Then open a new page.
A Few Reader Prompts From the Reus Manuscript
If you want to bring Gaudí into your journal this week, try one of these:
- Open a page and write “What I actually believe about ________” at the top. (If you are not sure what to write in a journal, this is a good first move.) Pick one domain. Number your way to nine principles, like Gaudí did at twenty-six.
- Take a decision you have been turning over and list the constraints first, the way Gaudí hung weights from strings. Then see what shape the answer takes.
- Pick one entry from last year and ask Gaudí’s question: Is this ornament fulfilling a purpose, or is it just decoration? Edit accordingly.
One Last Thing
If this is the kind of writing you want more of – long, slow looks at the notebooks of historical figures and what they teach the rest of us about a daily journaling habit – my newsletter is where new pieces land first. You can join in under a minute on the subscribe page. I send these essays, plus the occasional short note when I find something in an archive I can’t keep to myself.
In the meantime, if you want to keep wandering, the natural next stop is my running guide to the journaling habits of successful people. Gaudí sits there alongside Leonardo, Einstein, Edison, Franklin, King, Bruce Lee, and a growing list of others who all, in their own way, did the work on paper.
Featured image: Antoni Gaudí in 1878, the year he graduated and opened the Manuscrit de Reus. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
