The New Cathedral: Building on the Past--for the Future

You don’t have to be religious to feel uplifted by the great cathedrals of Europe and Latin America. Monuments of an age of faith, they still reach out to everyone, anchoring city centers, providing serene retreats from the bustle of daily life and making ageless beauty universally accessible. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, plans to dedicate a new cathedral in the year 2000, as a spiritual and civic focus for downtown Los Angeles. Five of the world’s most adventurous architects, selected by a jury from a list of 46 contenders, are vying for the prize. There’s Santiago Calatrava and Jose Rafael Moneo, both from Spain; Frank O. Gehry & Associates and Morphosis, both in Santa Monica, and Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, from Philadelphia. Mahony will make a final choice from three ranked finalists by June 1.

Building the cathedral offers an exciting opportunity to excel--for church and city alike. Great public buildings are rare and the chances to secure them are often fumbled-look at the Disney Concert Hall. That masterpiece may yet be built; however, the cathedral has even greater potential as a beacon. It will draw together the 4 million members of the archdiocese--America’s largest--and should energize all of downtown, especially the blighted blocks surrounding it. The jury, co-chaired by downtown developer and project director Ira E. Yellin and architecture professor Richard Weinstein, have cast a wide net and weighed experience and potential, practicality and poetry in making their choices.

Each semi-finalist has a distinctive approach to building. Calatrava is an architect-engineer, now working out of Zurich, whose Galleria in Toronto and high-speed railroad station outside Lyon, France, have the grandeur and daring of the greatest cathedrals. Moneo combines gravity and exuberance in his architecture--particularly in the powerful Roman Museum of Merida, Spain. Gehry & Associates have won acclaim worldwide for almost every building type and is currently competing to design a parish church in Rome. Morphosis, a leader of L.A.’s avant-garde, has begun to realize its visionary ideas on a large scale in Asia and in the design of two local schools. Venturi Scott Brown is the most controversial: a firm whose work always provokes strong opinions, for and against, notably in its additions to London’s National Gallery of Art and, most recently, its transformation of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla.

The cardinal has said he wants a cathedral for the next millennium that will reflect the Latino tradition of the Catholic Church in the Americas. This instruction challenges the architects to look forward and back, seeking inspiration in the past for a fresh approach--a concept that sustained the church for much of its history. The cathedrals of London and Paris, Milan and Cologne are the crowning architectural glories of those cities, and have become beloved historical landmarks. But they began life as daring expressions of contemporary art and technology. Soaring Gothic vaults supported by flying buttresses and vast windows framed by delicate stone ribs must have seemed as startlingly original in the 12th century as a towering suspension bridge or cantilevered sports stadium does today. Nobody then looked back nostalgically to wattle and daub.

The church’s spiritual faith was once reflected in its patronage of the greatest architects and artists of the day-from Michelangelo and Christopher Wren to Titian and El Greco. Then, fissured by dissent and assaulted by skeptics, religious authorities faltered and began to retreat into the past. The recently completed National Cathedral in Washington is superbly crafted. But, like St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. John the Divine in New York, it’s deliberately archaic, a vain attempt to recapture vanished certainties.

Whoever is chosen to design Los Angeles’s new cathedral can do better than that. The exceptional religious buildings of such modern masters as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn point the way. Calatrava’s steel bridges and vaults are inspired by Gothic structures without mimicking them. Thom Mayne of Morphosis cites Le Corbusier’s pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp in France as a model of how massive walls can be modeled in natural light and achieve an air of sanctity in purely abstract terms. Gehry admires the Mission style, in churches and the Santa Barbara courthouse, for its human scale, comforting sense of solidity and play of light. “A cathedral should have a purity of purpose,” he says, ‘but that’s the hardest thing to achieve in architecture.”

The task of architect selected will be eased if the archdiocese can raise the funds to acquire the remaining two-thirds of the block bounded by Los Angeles and Main, Second and Third streets. That would make room for gardens and a plaza, and improve the chances of incorporating the old cathedral of St. Vibiana, completed 120 years ago and gravely damaged by the Northridge earthquake, into a new complex. Though architecturally undistinguished, it deserves to be saved as a rare memento of that era, the city’s first tall structure and an early expression of its cultural aspirations.

The acting rector of the cathedral, Monsignor Terrance L. Fleming, will supervise construction and is looking forward to the final selection process, when each architect will be interviewed and given a practical exercise to demonstrate how he works. “We’ll learn who has passion and soul,” he says. “I’m going to be wed to one of these guys for five years, so I want a careful choice. The building should look like a church, not a spaceship, but we want the architects to show us what is possible. It should be beautiful because we expect it to last for centuries.”

In the 990s, many believed the world would end in the year 1000, and sought salvation by building churches. Today, we’re a bit more optimistic. As we look to the third millennium of the Christian era, it’s crucial to treat the past as a springboard for the generation of forms that future ages will cherish. The archdiocese and its chosen architect have the responsibility to build for all time, and to find a convincing expression of confidence in our ability to create a better world.