5 Architects Selected to Vie for St. Vibiana’s Job

Plans for a new St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, which backers hope will help revive downtown Los Angeles while providing a spiritual center for the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, advanced Wednesday with the naming of five potential architects for the coveted and controversial job.

The semifinalists are some of the biggest names in contemporary architecture in the United States and Western Europe. Among them is Frank O. Gehry, whose inclusion represents something of a vindication for the designer of the Disney Concert Hall, which has been stalled by cost and fund-raising problems.

Rounding out the list are the Morphosis firm headed by Thom Mayne of Santa Monica, known locally for the Cedars-Sinai cancer center and the Kate Mantilini restaurant; Venturi Scott Brown and Associates of Philadelphia, headed by the celebrated Robert Venturi, designers of the Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery and the new expansion of San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art; Santiago Calatrava, a Zurich-based Spaniard who created European bridges and railroad stations and a transept for the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and Jose Rafael Moneo of Madrid, a former Harvard professor praised for his National Museum of Roman Art in Spain and the pending Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

The archdiocese’s jury of architects, planners and artists is expected to recommend three of those names to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony next month, and the cardinal is to make a final choice in June, officials said.

In an upcoming exercise, the semifinalists will be asked to design a hypothetical religious shrine, not the cathedral, according to Ira E. Yellin, a downtown developer who is jury co-chairman and one of the project’s managers.

The winner must persuade church leaders that he can create an inspiring cathedral that at least hints of Spanish Colonial style, on a site at 2nd and Main streets that suffers from urban woes. The designer also will face preservationists’ demands that the existing 120-year-old St. Vibiana’s building be saved and included in any new complex. The archdiocese contends that fixing the earthquake-damaged church would be too expensive but says the chosen architect will make the determination.

The five semifinalists share no common style, but all showed “a seriousness of purpose and a depth of exploration . . . associated with building a religious structure at the turn of the millennium,” said jury co-chairman Richard Weinstein, a UCLA architecture professor.

Weinstein added that the task will be “extremely high-pressured and complex” because the cardinal wants to dedicate the basic structure in the year 2000. The archdiocese has received $45 million in gifts and pledges to replace the cramped church.

The five names “are pretty heavy hitters,” said Richard Bergmann, national chairman of the American Institute of Architects section that deals with religious architecture.

But all face the difficult challenge that “the building must give you an uplifting feeling of spirit, when you approach it or walk in.”

Linda Dishman, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, said she is optimistic that the final architect will “be as enamored with the historic St. Vibiana’s Cathedral as we are and will make it an integral part of the cathedral complex.”

The conservancy says the existing church could be made seismically safe with $4.6 million of bracing and other repairs, about a quarter of the expense estimated by the archdiocese. She said she did not know if any of the five would argue for preservation.

Forty-six prominent architects were invited to submit resumes for the job, and most wrote essays about how religion could be expressed in a building.

Gehry said Tuesday that a new cathedral in downtown Los Angeles “has the opportunity of making people feel good about themselves and their city . . . whether they are Catholic or not. It’s a yearning for some spiritual place, a sanctum.”

Gehry, whose design for the Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles includes a Roman Catholic chapel, said it was too early to discuss a specific cathedral plan.

Gehry and other architectural experts said they are pleased to see his name on the cathedral list because they feared that he might be excluded because of the delays in building the Disney Concert Hall. He apparently persuaded the jury that his flower-like design for Disney Hall was not the cause for the project’s doubling in cost.

The cathedral jury did not seek to unravel the Disney Hall situation but investigated 10 recently built projects of Gehry’s in the United States and Europe, Weinstein said. The clients reported that their working experience with Gehry was excellent, and “the buildings were built on time and for their budget.”

Gehry’s radical designs are represented in California by his houses, the Loyola Law School and the shiny Anaheim Community Ice Arena. In Europe, he has designed the American Center in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Venturi and Gehry have both won the Pritzker Prize, the highest in architecture. Venturi’s National Gallery addition in London showed that he can sensitively add to an existing historic structure amid political controversy, critics said.

His Seattle Art Museum is in another tight urban location. Plus, Venturi, who led the fight against sterile modernism, renovated a Roman Catholic church in Philadelphia.

Jury members said they were attracted by Calatrava’s design for the New York cathedral and by his huge vaulted passageways, reminiscent of Gothic cathedrals, in a Toronto arcade. Similar elements are in his railroad station in Lyon, France.

Moneo’s Roman art museum in Spain also has large vaulted spaces and combines contemporary and ancient traditions, they said. Morphosis’ quirky style has come to represent hip Los Angeles, especially the Los Angeles Free Clinic building on Beverly Boulevard and restaurants such as 72 Market Street.