What you are looking at here is how Gaudi designed the church from an architectural point of view. The design was modeled at the turn of the 20th century, well before computers could simulate load and tension in materials. Gaudi used individual sand bags with hand-counted grains of sand to represent load on certain parts of the building. The load is distributed across several arches to the base of the building. This representation is actually the building upside-down, with the bags representing weight that would be equivalent upward. If the arch isn't straight, it's not going to hold and the weight of that area could be adjusted accordingly.
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