Preserving the Past

The following script is from "60 Minutes Presents: Preserving the Past" which aired on Feb. 28

Good evening. And welcome to "60 Minutes Presents." I'm Scott Pelley. Tonight, "Preserving the Past." We'll explore three memorable buildings, where architecture is honored and history is kept alive. We're going to begin in Washington with a museum that has yet to open its doors.

A Monumental Project

Four hundred years have past since America's original sin and still riots are ignited in the friction between race and justice. As this debate continues the Smithsonian is completing a monumental project, the $500 million National Museum of African American History and Culture. The idea was authorized by an act of Congress which called it, quote, "a tribute to the Negro's contribution to the achievements of America." The words are jarring because the act was written in 1929. As we first told you last spring, building the museum has been a long struggle, just like the story it hopes to tell.

Beside the monument to Washington, a slave-holding president, the museum was breaking free of the ground last year on the mall's last five acres. Eight decades after Congress framed a museum on paper and then failed to fund it, the dream is being written now in steel and stone. Ten floors. Five above ground, five below. Its complexion, rendered in shades of bronze, a building of color against history's white marble.

Scott Pelley: You've been at this nine years now. It's a big job.

Lonnie Bunch: Well, as I tell people, at eight in the morning I have the best job in America. And at two in the morning it's the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life.

[Lonnie Bunch: This is a Romare Bearden from the 1950s.]

Sleepless nights are all in a day's work for the museum's founding director Lonnie Bunch, a scholar of the 19th century.

[Lonnie Bunch: Clearly this is ought to be one of those moments where people are going to sort of reflect, pause.]

[Lonnie Bunch: What does it mean once we open? What does it mean in terms of development opportunities...]

"America will have a place that allows them to remember, to remember, how much we as a country have been improved, changed, challenged, and made better by the African-American experience."

In 2003, President Bush signed the law creating the museum. Congress put up $270 million. And, Bunch has raised most of another 270.

Lonnie Bunch: I knew that this is where this museum would have to be. That this is America's front lawn and this is the place where people come to learn what it means to be an American and this museum needs to there.

Scott Pelley: So, we're on the ground floor, this is where the visitors will come in. This will be their first experience in the museum. So, what's going to be here?

Lonnie Bunch: They will walk in either from the mall or from Constitution Ave and they will run in to amazing pieces of African-American art.

Scott Pelley: When all of this is finally complete what will America have?

Lonnie Bunch: America will have a place that allows them to remember, to remember, how much we as a country have been improved, changed, challenged, and made better by the African-American experience. They'll have a place that they can call home but they'll also have a place that will make them change.

But even this place is only space until you fill it.

[Smithsonian staff: Oh my goodness. Now did somebody already look at some of these things for you?

Woman: No.

Smithsonian staff: No?]

Eight years ago the Smithsonian began rummaging the attics and basements of America.

[Smithsonian staff: This may have marked a milestone in his life. And, what we don't know is what that was.

Woman: But at least it gives me something I can investigate.]

Three thousand people brought their family history to 16 Smithsonian events across the country.

[Mary Elliott: And this is the early free black family based out of Baltimore?

Donor: Yes.]

Scott Pelley: It sounds like "Antiques Road Show."

Nancy Bercaw: It is like "Antiques Road Show."

Mary Elliott and Nancy Bercaw are curators.

Mary Elliott: We have experts from across the museum field. Experts in conservation. Experts who understand about paper, about metals, about you-name-it, fabrics, textiles. And they come in and they review objects for the public.

[Smithsonian staff: The coating on this is in pretty good condition.

Smithsonian staff: Some of that looks like it's dried out a little bit.

Smithsonian staff: And don't put it near the air-conditioning unit because that will dry it out too much.]

Scott Pelley: How do you convince someone to give up a priceless family heirloom?

Nancy Bercaw: Do you know what? Our museum pitches itself. All we have to do is tell the absolute honest truth. People have been waiting for us. People in America have been waiting for this moment. And so, literally they just hand us things.

Mary Elliott: And we're very excited like you are.

Thousands of relics were examined. But only 25 will be in the collection. This is one of them.

Renee Anderson: This was actually a connection we made with the family. Mr. Jesse Burke was an enslaved man and he was charged with playing this violin and entertaining the slave holder and his guest.

This is the Smithsonian's warehouse in Maryland where the story is being written. And these are a few of the lines.

"Received by Grigsby E. Thomas, the sum of three hundred and fifty dollars in full payment for a Negro boy by the name of Jim, about ten years old...this 31st day of December, 1835."

Jim would have been familiar with these, shackles dating before 1860, bondage that might have been broken if the keeper of this Bible had succeeded in his bloody rebellion. Nat Turner had said that God commanded him to break the chains. His Bible was taken away before his execution. Paul Gardullo is a leader of the curating team.

Paul Gardullo: I think many of us who know the story of slavery, know about Nat Turner; know about Nat Turner from the perspective of perhaps a freedom fighter, perhaps a murderer. Well, we know this is a religious person. We know this is a person who can read. And when you begin with that, and those ideas, suddenly, the person of Nat Turner and your understandings of Nat Turner take on a whole new light. And I look to do that again and again. Ways that we can see well-worn stories, stories we think we know, in a new light.

You may think you know the story of a boy murdered for whistling at a white woman until you are confronted with his casket.

Lonnie Bunch: The story of Emmett Till is a crucially important story in terms of what it tells us both about sort of reinvigorating the Civil Rights movement, but also it's a story of his mother, Mamie Mobley, who was really one of the most powerful people, who said that her son's murder should not be in vain, that it should help to transform America.

No one was punished for the murder of Emmett Till. His body was exhumed in a later investigation. And the original casket was neglected.

Lonnie Bunch: But then the question was: Would we ever display it? Should we ever display it? And I wrestled a lot with it, but then I realize I kept hearing Mamie Mobley in my head. And she said, "I opened this casket to change the world, to make the world confront the dangers, the power, the ugliness of race in America."

Scott Pelley: A lot of the things that you intend to put on display are gonna be hard to look at.

Lonnie Bunch: What I'm trying to do is find the right tension between moments of sadness and moments of resiliency.

One resilient moment came out of the blue. Air Force Captain Matt Quy and his wife Tina rebuilt an old crop duster and in curiosity they sent the serial number to an Air Force historian.

Matt Quy: And he said, "Are you sitting down? Because I have some news for ya."

Turned out the 1944 the Stearman trained America's first black squadrons, the Tuskegee Airmen, who flew to fame in World War II.

Tina Quy: I had never really known much about the Tuskegee Airmen. I'd seen a P-51 plane but I'd never really, truly, understood what it meant.

[Matt Quy: Take your time.]

Before donating the plane, known as a PT-13, the Quys carried the last of the airmen back to the air.

Matt Quy: And it was just great to sit back in the back seat and look at this real Tuskegee Airman in a real Tuskegee airplane. Just magical.

Tuskegee Airman: The greatest thrill in my life was sitting in the seat where you are and watching the ground drop out from underneath me.

Lt. Col. Leo Gray: The PT-13 was the baby that we used to learn how to fly.

The Smithsonian collected the thoughts of Lieutenant Colonel Leo Gray in 2010.

Leo Gray: They said we couldn't fly. But we had the best record of any fighter group in the 15th Air Force and probably in the Air Force itself. We stayed with our bombers. We brought them home as best we could. And we proved that we could fly.

Time is the enemy of history. So, Smithsonian conservationists have been working for years restoring America's heritage from textiles to trains. This 1920 railcar had two sections "white" and "colored." The same number of seats but "colored" was compressed in half the space -- physical, touchable, Jim Crow confinement just like the guard tower from the prison in Angola, Louisiana; notorious for cruelty.

Carlos Bustamante: It's about 21 feet tall. And this is cast concrete, so it's an enormous object.

From monumental to miniscule, Carlos Bustamante is the project manager building a place for 33,000 moments in time.

Carlos Bustamante: So when you had the railcar, the railcar pieces, the guard tower, and all the support equipment, we had a convoy of about 12 semi-trucks traveling down the road across six states to get here. And it took them about three days.

Scott Pelley: How do you get those things into this building?

Carlos Bustamante: So we set up two very, very large cranes. And these cranes are rare. There's not a lot of them this size. And we picked up these two objects, and basically brought them over the site and lowered them down about 60 feet below grade.

Scott Pelley: The answer is, you don't move these objects into the building, you put these objects in place and you build the building around them?

Carlos Bustamente: Exactly. There's no other way, there's no other way.

Paul Gardullo: Oftentimes what I'm drawn to are some of the smaller things; shards of glass that were picked up after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and it's finding the balance between the big and the small, Scott, that makes this work a challenge and so wonderful.

Scott Pelley: What is something that you desperately want and have not been able to find?

Paul Gardullo: I want Willie Mays' mitt.

Which would be quite a catch to display along with Louis Armstrong's horn, and Chuck Berry's horn behind the chrome of his '73 Cadillac. There's the welcome of Minton's Playhouse which resonated to Miles, Monk and Dizzy. Ali's headgear, pristine condition. And this firemen's head gear, a revolutionary invention in 1914 by mechanical genius Garrett Morgan.

Scott Pelley: Do you think the country's ready for this now?

Lonnie Bunch: I don't think America is ever ready to have the conversation around race based on what we see around the landscape, whether it's Ferguson or other places, that people are really ready to shine the light on all the dark corners of the American experience. But I hope this museum will help in a small way to do that.

Scott Pelley: This is not the American Museum of Slavery?

Lonnie Bunch: This is not the Museum of Tragedy. It is not the Museum of Difficult Moments. It is the museum that says, "Here is a balanced history of America that allows us to cry and smile."

On September 24th, America's first black president will cut the ribbon to the Smithsonians' first National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

Saving History

The following is a script of "Saving History" which aired on October 19, 2014, and was rebroadcast on February 28, 2016. Morley Safer is the correspondent. David Browning and Sabina Castelfranco, producers.

It's estimated that Italy is home to two-thirds of the world's cultural treasures. Trouble is, the country is too broke to keep its historic ruins, churches and monuments from crumbling to dust. Italy is up to its neck in debt. Taxes go unpaid. Corruption in an overstuffed bureaucracy is rife. But now some of its most treasured and endangered landmarks are being saved, not by the government, but by a more respected Italian institution: the fashion business. As Morley Safer reported in 2014, it's stepped in to rescue some of Italy's most iconic sites. Among them, the very symbol of its rich, violent and inventive history: the Colosseum in Rome.

With its stunning, timeless sights, it's justifiably called the eternal city. A holy place to billions. A vast landscape of the sacred and profane. An architectural delight, especially when viewed at sunset.

And smack in the middle is the Colosseum, the greatest surviving wonder of the ancient world, a memorial to the rise, decline and fall of imperial Rome. A place truly colossal.

Kimberly Bowes: We think it seats about 50,000 people. But this number depends on how wide you think the Roman behind was. If you think that they had big behinds, then you calculate less. Small behinds, you calculate more.

Backsides aside, professor Kimberly Bowes is the director of the American Academy in Rome and an expert on ancient Mediterranean history, who knows every inch of the Colosseum. She's taking us to the very top level, far above where tourists tread, for a sight that over the centuries very few people have seen first hand.

Kimberly Bowes: The view is terrifying! And the view is extraordinary. Look at this; this is where the poor people sat. You really get the scale of this building here, though. Look how big this is. Look how big this is! People are ants!

The place was built by the hands of slaves in just 10 years, finished a mere half century after the crucifixion. The performers here were gladiators, wild animals, even comedians.

Morley Safer: I gather that this place was the entertainment center, the Broadway of its day, yes?

Kimberly Bowes: In a way. The whole point is to produce marvels, to produce a spectacle that would have amazed the audience.

Kimberly Bowes: The people with the most power, the senators, are down at the bottom. And the people with the least power, the slaves and the women, are up at the top.

Morley Safer: Women?

Kimberly Bowes. Women. Like you don't want women to get too close to gladiators. You have to keep them separate. Because your greatest fear, you have two fears if you're a Roman man. One is that your slave is going to kill you one day in your bed. And your second fear is that your wife is going to run off with a slave, like a gladiator. This is what everyone's afraid of, so you've got to put the women up on the top.

Morley Safer: So even though the gladiators were slaves, they were kind of the movie stars of their day.

Kimberly Bowes: They were.

And we turn to Hollywood for an idea of how it all might have looked.

Kimberly Bowes: There's a moment in "Gladiator" where Russell Crowe walks out to right where we are.

Professor Bowes gives the filmmakers high marks for the historical accuracy of their computer recreation of the Colosseum.

Kimberly Bowes: The whole drama is really the reenactment of Roman conquest. The continual expansion of the empire.

Backstage was actually underground: the basement.

Kimberly Bowes: Until recently this was just filled with dirt.

A labyrinth of corridors: dungeons for slaves, cages for animals, all brought from the far reaches of the empire. And wooden elevators, raised by ropes and pulleys, leading to trap doors in the stage.

Kimberly Bowes: There's a wonderful scene in "Gladiator" where the tiger pops out of the floor.

Kimberly Bowes: This is exactly the kind of thing that would have been used to wow the audience.

Since the 18th century, the Roman Catholic Church has venerated the Colosseum as a symbol of the early Christian martyrs who were put to death for their beliefs.

Professor Bowes tells visitors there were indeed early Christians quietly executed elsewhere in Rome. But as for the Colosseum...

Kimberly Bowes: We have not one piece of evidence that any Christians were ever killed in this building. Not one. There are, I think, really interesting reasons for this. If you take a group of people who, by all accounts, are extraordinarily brave in the face of certain death and you put them in this space and put them on display, who's everyone going to cheer for? They're going to cheer for the Christians, right? Because they show such extraordinary bravery. This is not a smart thing to do politically.

[Man: So I'm in the famous Colosseum...]

Six million tourists a year visit here, snapping selfies and posing with rent-a-gladiators who pass the time with cigarettes and cell phones. The place has survived fires and earthquakes over the centuries. Now there's a new crisis: finding the money to manage the crowds and keep up with basic maintenance. The director of the Colosseum is Rossella Rea.

Rossella Rea: The money isn't there. There's very little, totally inadequate funding. Only five percent of what we need.

Too little money and from the Italian parliament, too much red tape.

Morley Safer: A lot of people say the bureaucracy is so top heavy that that's the reason why things don't get done.

Rossella Rea: Bureaucracy is not just heavy, it is extremely heavy. And we are the first victims. Bureaucracy for us is a killer.

But that scaffolding you saw earlier is a sign that help is on the way. The Colosseum is getting a badly needed facelift, with money from an unlikely source.

To prevent further ruin, a benefactor is spending an arm and a leg - $35 million - on a place where, two thousand years ago, gladiators and slaves literally lost arms, legs and lives, and all in the name of show business.

The benefactor is Diego Della Valle, a prominent Italian businessman, who knows a lot about the business of showing. Della Valle is CEO of Tod's, the luxury leather goods company. Crafting stylish shoes and bags has long been an Italian specialty. Having made his bundle, Della Valle decided to give some back to the state.

Italian businessman Diego Della Valle CBS News

Morley Safer: Why spend so much of your own money, millions upon millions, to fix this wreck?

Diego Della Valle: Why not? Well, I am Italian. I am very proud to be Italian. And there is a very famous Kennedy speech, no? Is the moment that what is possible for us to do for our country, we need to do now.

The shoes that made Della Valle's fortune are assembled the old-fashioned way: by hand, stitch by stitch. And the work he's funding at the Colosseum is also about as low tech as it gets.

It's being cleaned literally inch by inch to get rid of centuries of caked-on dust, grime, air and auto pollution. The stone is travertine, a kind of limestone. No chemicals are allowed, only purified water and elbow grease: days, weeks, months, years on end of scrubbing. Built by hand, saved by hand.

Morley Safer: How long is it going to take?

Diego Della Valle: The Colosseum, I think three years from now.

Morley Safer: And what will it look like, do you think, when they're finished.

Diego Della Valle: I am very curious.

To get some idea, we were shown a few sections that have been completely cleaned. Two thousand years old, and looking almost brand new.

And in the world of high style, it's become fashionable to follow Della Valle's example. An entire parade of fashionistas are bankrolling similar worthy causes. The Fendi fashion house donated $ 3.5 million for some new plumbing for a familiar waterworks.

It's the Trevi Fountain, where 54 years ago Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg went wading, in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," the sweet life. Forever linking Rome and romance.

Silvia Fendi: This movie helped a lot to build this powerful image of the Trevi Fountain. Cinema has big power.

Silvia Fendi's grandfather started the business 90 years ago. And as we spoke, huge crowds had a last chance to throw in a coin before the closing of the site for repairs.

Silvia Fendi: It means that you will be in good health in order to come back. So it's very important for us. This country gave us a lot. And so it's nice at a point to give back something.

Elsewhere in Rome, the Bulgari fashion house is paying to clean and repair the Spanish Steps, where tourists stop to rest their feet. A Japanese fashion company with ties to Italy is restoring the Pyramid of Cestius, built to honor a noble Roman two decades before the birth of Christ, after the Roman conquest of Egypt. And in Venice, the four hundred year old Rialto Bridge over the Grand Canal will be cleaned and strengthened, thanks to seven million dollars from this.

[Man: Renzo Rosso.]

Morley Safer: Is the government too poor, too broke, to maintain its treasures?

Renzo Rosso: No, I think we have to face with the reality. The reality is that, they don't have money.

Rosso is a farmer's son, a self-made man known as the jeans genius. As in Diesel jeans. He built the brand from the ground up, expanding into other businesses and becoming a billionaire several times over.

[Renzo Rosso: I want it more short.]

His sleek headquarters rival anything in Silicon Valley, what with the espresso bars and day care, where kids learn the international language of business.

[Woman: Clap out ... clap in.]

But the fashion industry is a rare bright spot in the stagnant Italian economy. And these workers are the lucky ones. Elsewhere, fully half the country's young adults are unemployed. There's corruption, public and private, and widespread tax evasion.

Renzo Rosso: The Italian people are tired of this corruption. Because we have too many people that steal, too many people that put the money in his pocket. We have 40 percent of people who don't pay tax. Can you imagine? Forty percent. It's unbelievable.

Pope Francis talks about the problem in scathing terms, saying corrupt politicians, businessmen and priests are everywhere. And the country's young new prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has declared war on the political establishment, saying the whole system should be scrapped. Diego Della Valle agrees.

Diego Della Valle: I think it's possible now to open a new way. The old point of view was without any sense. I hope in the new point of view. I push for the new point of view.

But as Della Valle's scrubbers continue their work, it's worth noting that his generous offer to restore the country's greatest monument was mired in the bureaucratic mud for nearly three years before work could begin.

Kimberly Bowes: This is the real challenge that Italy has. This is why sites are closed and monuments are falling down. The bureaucracy will have to change in order to actually make it possible for someone to come and say, "Here, do you want $25 million?" Without the bureaucracy saying, "Well, I don't know. I'll have to think about it."

But time has a way of standing still for Italians. Past glories are always present. The food remains superb and the noble wines still lubricate the conversation. On the surface, it's still la dolce vita. The sweet life. As for the future - that's somebody else's problem.

God's architect

Before stepping down as pope, Benedict XVI carried out thousands of official duties over eight years, but only once did he travel outside Rome to bestow the Vatican's highest honor on a church, transforming it into a basilica -- a sacred place forever.

Tonight, we're going to take you to that extraordinary church. It's called the Sagrada Família and, if you've ever been to Barcelona, Spain, you couldn't have missed it. It may be one of the most spectacular buildings ever constructed by man, the vision of genius Spanish architect, Antoni Gaudí, known as God's architect, who died almost a century ago. It's been under construction for 130 years and it's still not finished.

Why would a church take so long to build? Because, as Lara Logan first reported in 2013, Gaudí's design was as complicated as it was advanced. Today, the Sagrada Família has become the longest running architectural project on earth.

When Pope Benedict came to the Sagrada Família, it was the first time mass had ever been held here. In an ancient tradition as old as the Catholic Church, he consecrated the Sagrada Família as a basilica.

Not since 1883, when it was envisioned by Antoni Gaudí, had it been seen in all its glory.

Eight hundred voices filled the air, one of the largest choirs in the world and close to 7,000 people gathered, celebrating a moment that had taken 128 years to arrive.

While the inside is mostly finished, outside there's still much to be done. You can see the spires and construction cranes for miles.

Watch as this picture moves in from above -- those tiny figures below are people dwarfed by the massive facade, rising from the main entrance of the church.

Antoni Gaudí was profoundly devout and this was his way to make amends to God for the sins of the modern world.

Gijs van Hensbergen: I mean, he wanted to write the history of the whole of the Catholic faith in one building. I mean, how crazy and how extraordinary and how ambitious and how, in a sense, megalomaniac that idea is.

Gijs van Hensbergen immersed himself in Antoni Gaudí's life for 10 years and wrote what's considered the definitive biography. He took us to see the Nativity Facade, the only part built while Gaudí was alive.

Gijs van Hensbergen: It's the Bible written in stone.

Lara Logan: So every single little thing that you look at there, every detail symbolizes something real?

Gijs van Hensbergen: Yea, and that was the idea, that we together would spend days here, me teaching you if I was a priest, what the story was and what the symbolism was. And once you get inside is a wonderful, kind of spiritual boost.

The ceiling is a striking display of Gaudí's engineering genius. He wanted the interior of his church to have the feel of a forest because that's where he believed man could feel closest to God. And when you look upwards, you can see Gaudí's columns branching out like trees.

Gijs van Hensbergen: Trees are actually buildings, he said. It knows where to throw out a branch. And if you look at the Sagrada Família today that's exactly what happens with those bizarre, eccentric-- they look bizarre and eccentric but the engineering beneath it is absolutely exceptional.

Van Hensbergen pointed out that, as you move towards the altar, the columns are made from stronger and stronger stone. Gaudí chose red porphyry from Iran, for the ones that bear the heaviest load, because it's among the strongest in the world.

Lara Logan: If you had to define, sort of, the one thing, that distinguished Gaudí as an architect, what would it be?

Gijs van Hensbergen: The capacity to see space in a totally different way, to make space explode, to see a building as a sculpture rather than just as a place to live in or a roof over your head. He's someone who reinvented the language of architecture which no other architect has ever managed to do.

Lara Logan: How many years ahead of his time was he?

Gijs van Hensbergen: Oh he was a century ahead, he was a century ahead.

Gaudí knew the Sagrada Família would not be completed in his lifetime, so he spent years building these elaborate plaster models. This one is of the church's ceiling. They would have to act as a guide for future generations of architects to follow his complicated design and he knew that without them, it would never be finished the way he intended.

[Jordi Bonet: I am very old, but--

Lara Logan: You're very old?

Jordi Bonet: This next month. Yes.

Lara Logan: But?

Jordi Bonet t: 87.]

Gaudí's legacy has been in the hands of this man's family for more than 80 years. Jordi Bonet came here for the first time in 1932, when he was just 7 years old.

Lara Logan: Do you remember what this was like when you first came here?

Jordi Bonet: Yes.

Lara Logan: Was it nothing like this?

Jordi Bonet: Nothing of this - only this facade, the walls. And the other facade. This was nothing.

For years, the Sagrada Família was little more than a ruin, a pile of rubble and open sky. And it may have stayed that way were it not for this one family.

This is Jordi Bonet's father who was one of the lead architects here for more than 40 years. Jordi followed him as chief architect for almost three decades. And his daughter Mariona is an architect here today. Together, they've spent more time working on this church than Gaudí himself.

The devotion to Gaudí runs deep here. Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo has spent 35 years in this church and this is where he expects to be for the rest of his life, sculpting the figures that adorn Gaudí's final masterpiece, consumed by the man and his vision.

Etsuro Sotoo (translator): Gaudí teaches me and helps me solve problems in my work. For me, he's not dead.

Lara Logan: Why did you convert to Catholicism? You became a Catholic.

Etsuro Sotoo (translator): I was a Buddhist. But after working here, I realized I couldn't do my job without knowing Gaudí, and to know him you have to be in the place he was, and that was a world of faith.

Gaudí's deep faith is the reason he became known as God's architect. This is one of the few photographs ever taken of him. He was 31 when he started working on the Sagrada Família. And over the next 43 years, it became an obsession.

Gijs van Hensbergen: He looked like a homeless person. His trousers were held up with string. His clothes were kind of frayed, and-- Because all he was interested in was the Sagrada Família. I mean that was every waking hour. To the point at the end of his life, actually, where he was sleeping on the site.

Gaudí died suddenly at this intersection, in 1926, when he was hit by a tram. The driver pushed him aside, mistaking the beloved architect for a tramp.

Gijs van Hensbergen: The photos show you these people kind of bereft of their builder. The builder of God.

After his death, the builder of God's plaster models continued to guide construction for the next 10 years, until 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out.

Anarchists attacked the Sagrada Família. This photo captures smoke billowing from its sides. All those models Gaudí had spent years building were smashed to pieces.

Lara Logan: Wow, these are all the original pieces that were picked up from his studio?

Mark Burry: Yup, and they've been sort of painstakingly identified.

These shattered fragments were rescued from the rubble and ashes by Jordi Bonet's father and a team of architects. There are thousands of them locked away inside this room in the Sagrada Família. They are the structural DNA of Gaudí's church.

Mark Burry: They are absolutely the link. Not a vague link, not a, a source of evidence, it's the source of evidence.

New Zealander Mark Burry was studying architecture at Cambridge University in England when he first came to the Sagrada Família on a backpacking trip in 1977.

He'd come at just the right moment. The architects were stuck. The second facade had just been completed and they were ready to take on the main body of the church, but no one could figure out how to build it as Gaudí intended.

Lara Logan: What were you going to do that they couldn't do?

Mark Burry: My task was to actually reverse engineer the models, if you like.

Reverse engineer them so he could understand how Gaudí's models were supposed to fit together, almost like the pieces of a complex puzzle. He told us Gaudí's design was so advanced there was nothing like it in the language of architecture at the time. In the end, he turned to the most sophisticated aeronautical design software available.

Mark Burry: We had to look to other professions who've actually tackled the complexities of the Sagrada Família, which are basically complex shapes and surfaces so that's the vehicle industry: the car designers, the ship designers, the plane designers. They've been grappling for decades with the very same issues that Gaudí was putting up as architectural challenges.

Lara Logan: So you are using the most up to date aeronautical engineering software to complete something that he conceived of in the late 1800's.

Mark Burry: Absolutely.

After 34 years, Mark Burry is now one of the lead architects. He took us up to their construction site in the sky, way above the city. From up here, you can see all the way to the Mediterranean.

Lara Logan: How did they build these towers a 130 years ago?

Mark Burry: They built them by hand.

Today, massive cranes swing heavy equipment and materials across the sky, constructing the Sagrada Família precisely as Gaudí envisioned. Burry says they still rely on Gaudí's models to guide them, nearly a hundred years later.

Mark Burry: What's extraordinary is because of the system that Gaudí put in place using these particular geometries. It all fits within fractions of an inch.

The spot where we're standing is where they're building Gaudí's central tower. At 566 feet, it will make this the tallest church on earth. Gaudí designed it to be three feet shorter than the tallest surrounding mountain in deference to God.

Lara Logan: When you finish this tower it's going to be double where we are right now?

Mark Burry: We're going to get this view amplified by two.

Mark Burry says it will take at least another 13 years to finish the Sagrada Família, which is paid for entirely by donations to the church.

During the pope's visit, Jordi Bonet was called on to represent the three generations of architects, engineers and sculptors who have brought Gaudí's vision this far.

Lara Logan: Do you think you will see this complete?

Jordi Bonet: This is very difficult to answer. My age is a big age. But it is possible.

Lara Logan: Do you have any doubt in your mind that this will be finished one day?

Jordi Bonet: Oh yes, I believe.