A Divine Intersection

Jose Rafael Moneo lives in a delicately balanced world. The Spanish architect works and lives in twin honey-colored houses four blocks apart, their plain forms hidden behind rows of Chinese elms, part of a 1930s-era garden city plan that was never finished. Across town, the Cine Capitol, a curvaceous Moderne corner building designed in 1930 by Moneo’s father-in-law, architect Luis Feduchi, punctuates one end of Madrid’s Gran Via. Beyond it, the silhouette of Moneo’s own design for the massive Atocha train terminal rises like a grid of billowing domes. Life and history are all perfectly interlaced.

Moneo, a former chairman of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, is currently designing museums in Houston and Stockholm, but his psychic center is here. Inside his office--its little rooms cluttered with drawings--Moneo is creating the $50-million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the new seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Moneo’s scheme is a composition of clean, asymmetrical forms, a vague abstraction of Spanish Mission themes. His patron, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, grandly predicts that the building will both sum up 2,000 years of Roman Catholic Church history and reinvent it for the next millennium. The groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for Sept. 21.

But here at work, Moneo seems light-years away from the crazy chaos of Los Angeles. Perhaps no two sensibilities could be further apart. Los Angeles, a chimeric city of the future, with its sprawling highways, flimsy bungalows, disposable landscapes, is the adolescent city; it is a city that worships the young. Moneo, by contrast, has no patience for random chaos. His obsession is time. For Moneo, architecture lies somewhere in between our own Modernist legacy and a more distant past. In Los Angeles, his task will be to give the city an aura of permanence, to strengthen its spiritual spine.

“I would say that to put architecture in the chain of history, to be able to interpret and understand why we are where we are, is quite crucial,” the slightly built Moneo says of his mission, delicately balancing a cardboard model of the cathedral on the tips of his fingers. With the cathedral, he says, “I would like to offer a space where people feel more able to isolate themselves from daily life. I would like to allow for a chance to go to higher reflection.”

“When I interviewed [the five finalists for the cathedral project] I interviewed each of them alone,” Mahony said in a telephone interview. “And I think it was interesting--they were all very pleasant and very gifted and very talented, but in most cases we were finished before the hour was up. Except for Moneo. We talked on and on. So immediately there began a relationship that was not only artistic and historical and traditional, but also philosophical, about the sacred space and the structure.”

To many, that bond could have been predicted. Alternately pensive and stern, Moneo appears more the devout thinker than master builder. Among today’s academic architects, who often cloak themselves in the mantle of the avant-garde, Moneo sometimes seems lost in a historical reverie. For him, architecture is not a great leap toward the future but a two-pronged adventure: a poetic quest, an ethical mission.

“Moneo still believes in the kind of pedagogical, uplifting, educational experience of the common man,” says Dagmar Richter, a German-born architect who was hired by Moneo during his tenure at Harvard in the 1980s. “It is a more aristocratic kind of tradition in the sense that the architect has not to entertain but to educate the overall society. . . . He was often described as an old Jesuit. Because in the end his concerns were a lot more about ethics.”

Born in 1937--in the midst of the Spanish Civil War--Moneo spent his early life in Franco’s Spain.

“There was no political alternative, so people were much more devoted to their professional lives,” Moneo says. “And then you had an entire well-educated generation of doctors and lawyers and economists that grew up under the Franco regime, and yet, because they were not involved at all in public life, they tried to make their lives by studying and traveling.”

But Moneo was slow to identify his own mission. His father was an electrical engineer who worked for the power company in Tudela, a small city in the shadow of Pamplona, in the northern region of Navarra. Rafael Moneo studied at Jesuit schools during the gloomy years of Franco’s early reign.

“I wouldn’t say that I was called [to architecture] forcefully,” he says now. “I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly--poetry, literature--this speculative attitude toward life.”

In the 1950s, architects like J.A. Coderch and Alejandro de la Soto struggled to reinvent Spanish Modernism after the post-civil-war stagnation. Later, Spain’s intellectual elite would engage in a more open dialogue with other European architects as Spain went from outright oppression to a meek liberalization to true re-integration with Europe.

Moneo too eventually found solace in the world of academia. After completing his studies in Madrid, he left for Denmark in 1961 to work for Danish architect Jorn Utzon, the designer of the famed Sydney Opera House. That same year, Moneo married Belen Feduchi. The couple spent their honeymoon in Sicily and then Rome--the traditional destination of the classically trained architect--and then stayed two years on a fellowship.

“In those years, I didn’t have a car so I lived one complete year without moving from Rome, without moving even 30 kilometers away,” he recalls. “That means I know the city of Rome very well. I walked continuously.”

For a young European architect at that time, it was an odd route. But his early education also foreshadowed a lifelong struggle to fuse the formal abstraction and international bent of the Modernist tradition with an older historical context--whether Classical, Baroque or Roman. Moneo was looking for clues, for the missing pieces that could be used to reassert Modernism’s influence. He was drawn toward a more cautious language, stripped of radical dogma.

That faith in historical truth seemed quaint to many in the United States. During the ‘70s in New York, Moneo joined Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies--a self-proclaimed radical think tank that at the time was attracting young talent from all over the world. There, he often appeared as something of an outsider. Recalls architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton: “I remember going to Spain, when Moneo had not built very much else, and visiting his [1972] Bankinter [a bank in Madrid] and thinking, as I stood before it, all these New Yorkers who treat Rafael as a charming Spanish intellectual but no one of any particular importance, he architecturally had already produced a building in the Bankinter which very few of them could have equaled even then, and certainly not since.”

By the mid-’80s, Moneo was working on two high-profile projects in his native Spain: the Atocha train terminal in Madrid and the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida. But it was only as the influential chairman of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design that Moneo finally shook off his secondary status on the international scene. If the graduate school had flourished in the 1940s under the radical leadership of the founder of the German Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, in the ‘70s and early ‘80s it was torn between the twin poles of bland corporatism and theoretical pretension. Students saw in Moneo a savior of sorts: the key to a more serious--even ethical--architecture, an alternative to the simple-minded superficiality of Postmodernism.

“You could see the kind of master builder, but also there was a kind of humbleness,” Richter says. “He was very, very personal when he talked about work, and he talked a lot about the moral framework of the student. I thought sometimes I was sitting there with a priest.”

Two buildings--the National Museum of Roman Art, completed in 1986 during his tenure at Harvard, and the Pilar and Joan Miro Foundation, a small museum in Palma de Mallorca, completed in 1992--established Moneo as a major architectural talent. Of those, the National Museum of Roman Art is his masterwork. In it Moneo’s particular understanding of history is clearest. Unlike the Postmodernists, Moneo sought deeper connections to the past.

“At the Museum of Roman Art,” he says, “the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.”

Built on the site of a Roman town, Moneo’s building is a blank brick frame that literally sits on top of the excavated ruins; an underground tunnel links the museum to a nearby Roman amphitheater.

There is a cool abstraction here. Inside, the heavy series of arches that support the building stands aggressively on top of the excavated ruins. New violates old. The dialogue is not about harmony but conflict. The exterior of the box-like building mimics the taut, abstract skin of early industrial works by Peter Behrens or Gropius. This is an orderly, internal world, the building’s blank facades seemingly meant to hold out the chaos around it.

The museum, in fact, is a sort of didactic lesson carved in stone: This is not Disney; there is no mock Roman glitz to lure you in. Long concrete ramps and walkways are meant to slow the visitor’s pace, guiding him into the galleries or down into the ruins below, as if these delicate memories must be exposed cautiously. Even the threshold into the underground ruins themselves is hesitant--to reach the excavation site you pass over an old Roman road that cuts through the building. But the bridge spanning the road is incomplete. Visitors momentarily trod on the sacred path itself, Roman bones crunching underneath.

In the galleries above, designed as a series of towering brick archways, Moneo achieves that same intimacy with a historical past. Everywhere there are overlapping paths. Above, two floors of steel walkways lead to smaller exhibits while casting views back into the main hall. Leave your guidebook on the bus: Here it is the space that teaches. Each path offers a different reading of the object, as if you were carefully leafing through an aged text. It is the Caracalla Roman baths, but the quest is knowledge--not sensual pleasure.

“There is a cultural limit here,” says Richard Sommer, a former student of Moneo’s who is now a scholar in residence at the California College of Arts and Crafts. “When [Moneo] talks about the Miro museum, for example, he will say flat out, ‘I was asked to do this building that’s surrounded by a lot of low-grade architecture, and the first thing I did was to create a visual strategy, to block out the view of all those things the building was surrounded by.’ And you can build a very strong strategy if you take that decisive point of view--that architecture is not about engaging everything. It’s about constructing something higher.”

Los Angeles, of course, is not Merida. The city is not infused with the same historical weight. The question in L.A. is how relevant historicism is. Some have suggested that Moneo’s is an inappropriate architecture for a city so geared for the future. In the cathedral competition, Moneo was up against two natives: Frank Gehry and Tom Mayne. Both are driven by an admiration for the Los Angeles of the everyday: Gehry has transformed that everyday architecture into art; Mayne’s work is marked by a more futuristic, dynamic aesthetic. Mulling over the current site now, Mayne talks about engaging the fantastic energy of the freeway.

In architecture, potentates often make the best clients, and in Cardinal Mahony, Moneo found one. As the head of the archdiocese and with the blessings of Rome, Mahony is the final authority on the design.

“Clearly only one person was going to win [the commission], and it is Rafael Moneo because he fit the philosophy of the Catholic Church,” architect Richter says. “Moneo had never spoken religiously, but look at the philosophy of his work, and then look at Gehry’s philosophy and I thought, ‘The cardinal is going to freak.’ He’s not going to accept that, purely because it will counter all his life philosophy. In the end it was pretty predictable.”

The timing was fortunate. In June 1996, atop the massive Getty Center site in Brentwood, Moneo was presented the Pritzker Prize--adding his name to a select list of what are ostensibly the world’s greatest living architects. Mahony sat up front grinning. The previous day, the archdiocese had announced that Moneo would design the new cathedral.

Yet the process did not run smoothly. The archdiocese ruffled feathers when it attempted to dismantle St. Vibiana’s, the former seat, without proper permits. The archdiocese wanted to tear down the earthquake-ravaged downtown building, while the Los Angeles Conservancy was fighting to keep it in place as a historic monument. Eventually, the decision over the building’s demolition became tied up in court battles. Undaunted, the archdiocese chose another site, three times bigger and much more prominently placed. When Our Lady of the Angels is completed sometime in the year 2000, it will sit at the end of Grand Avenue’s newly dubbed “Cultural Corridor,” along the same axis as the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Disney Concert Hall site and overlooking the Hollywood Freeway. Through all of the commotion, Moneo kept a cautious distance, saying only that the size of the new site was liberating. As for the former cathedral, he comments with a knowing wink that we all understand that it was not great architecture.

During many trips to Madrid to visit the architect, Mahony formed his own vision of the ideal church building.

“We went to the Toledo Cathedral, which is just magnificent,” he says. “And we stood there in that cathedral, and I said to Rafael, ‘This is what we don’t want.’ And I started pointing out to him, ‘See, that group of people over there, they’re trying to assist at Mass. See all these chapels along here--these people are all visiting the chapels, some are stopping to pray, some are taking pictures, some are talking about them. This whole place is chaos at the moment, and there is no separation of the personal devotional life from the more official liturgical life.”

It was that fear of chaos that led Moneo to, in effect, turn the cathedral inside out. Rather than reproduce the twin rows of chapels that traditionally flank the main worship space of a church, Moneo chose to turn the chapels around. In his design, the chapels open into more private exterior ambulatories. The central worship space remains undisturbed.

“One of the purposes of cathedral churches in a diocese is to serve as a model for the rest of the churches of the diocese, and not only in its ceremonies and liturgies but also in its structure and its space,” Mahony says. “We have almost three acres now. The plaza I see as the great subtle attracter to the site. Whether you go into the cathedral or not, the plaza will be the great gathering place.”

In fact, the new design can be read as a pat metaphor for the archdiocese’s views on its role in Los Angeles. Moneo’s chose not to aggressively engage the city but to attempt to draw the faithful into a poetic, self-contained universe. To those whizzing by on the Hollywood Freeway, the cathedral’s tower may seem a holy beacon, a reprimand to the spiritually lazy, but Moneo’s creation will be, in fact, an island.

As in his antiquities museum in Merida, Moneo’s cathedral will be part of a delicate spiritual procession. Visitors will enter from one of two points: underground parking at the far end of the plaza or a grand stair that pierces an arcade along Temple Street. From there, they will follow the arcade into the 160-foot-long ambulatory, before turning at the end of the nave and facing the altar. That sense of procession will be repeated in the structure of the various gardens, where the visitor will be led from the large communal plaza into more intimate, meditative spaces. It is a journey away from one world into another.

Moneo’s most remarkable invention is exactly this radical reordering of the church plan. But the building is also an attack against a more popular architecture.

“He was always anti-entertainment,” Richter recalls. “And that’s what the old Jesuits are anyway. Entertainment--never would that be acceptable. So certainly a lot of things get folded into what is his idea of ethics. And I think that the typical old-fashioned idea of ethics is that you would not fall into this deep hole of entertainment in order to be loved by the masses but that you would actually retain a certain critical position in society.”

Moneo sees his task more simply, as part of a constant struggle within architecture to build lasting work: “Always there will be someone writing poetry. Yet today it is much more difficult to find somebody who loves to write poetry. I think it will happen the same with architecture. The fact that architects are exploring other fields doesn’t mean that there will not be someone interested in exploring what architecture used to do.”

A decade ago, when Frampton first heard the news that Moneo had been hired at Harvard, he worried that the appointment would destroy the architect’s career.

“How could he continue to do his work as he’s constantly commuting between Harvard and Madrid? That was my reaction,” Frampton says. But Moneo, who left Harvard in 1990, is now building at a rapacious pace. He is designing the Spanish ambassador’s residence in Washington, and the architectural dynasty continues: His daughter, Belen--now also an architect--is currently assisting her father on a design for the Museum of Modern Art and Architecture in Stockholm.

Two of Moneo’s other projects best reveal the scope of his new work: the new Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the twin auditoriums of the Kursaal Auditorium and Congress Center in San Sebastian, Spain--both now under construction. The Museum of Fine Arts will be a low-key addition to a building designed by one of the century’s great Modernist masters, Mies van der Rohe. The Kursaal project is perhaps his most abstract project to date: two glowing, purist cubes, asymmetrically arranged around a stark plaza.

In all of these projects, the architect asserts the high seriousness of architecture as a discipline.

“I don’t have regrets of being an architect,” Moneo says. “You are looking continuously--to the leaves of the trees, the shapes of the cars, to the structures of the city, to the patterns of textiles--to find the reasons behind the forms. That is very rewarding. If you extend a profession like that to the entire history, it allows you to travel through time.”