Cathedral Builders Express Sense of Awe

Amid the cacophony of hammers, heavy equipment and orders shouted above the dust and din, a sense of the sacred is beginning to surround the massive new Roman Catholic cathedral under construction in downtown Los Angeles.

It is not just he and his fellow priests who feel the effect as the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels edges skyward to an eventual height of 11 stories, says Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.

Hard hats--workers who climb the towering cranes and pour the cement, who tie the rebar and drink from Thermos bottles--feel the hush within, the wonderment of making common ground holy.

“You go home every day and you think, my God, this is huge! It’s gonna be different than anything I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Mark Pineda, a crane rigger. “Every man out here puts his heart and soul into it. . . . When we’re all gone and our kids’ kids are gone, this thing is still going to be going strong.”

Recently, Mahony recounted the story of an electrician who spoke briefly to him during one of the cardinal’s frequent visits to the site on Temple Street between Grand Avenue and Hill Street.

“He said, ‘I finished another job and went to the union hiring hall. I didn’t know what work was available. All of a sudden I find myself working on the cathedral! Of all the projects I’ve done in 25 years, I’ve never been able to do something as magnificent as this for God. My family, they all want to know what happened when I get home. Before they could care less. Now their lives are touched by this because I’m building a cathedral.’ ”

By the time the $163-million cathedral is dedicated in the late summer or early fall of 2002, the City of Angels will be able to lay claim to a significant sacred space in this most secular of cities, Mahony said.

“People outside of Southern California know L.A. primarily through the entertainment industry, motion pictures, through artificiality, sets and props,” Mahony said. “You never hear anyone talk about any sacred spot or place.”

Not everyone shares the cardinal’s enthusiasm for the cathedral. Among the most prominent critics are members of Catholic Worker, a group that has long served the poor and homeless through soup kitchens and other outreach ministries.

“What we have here is an argument about a vision of the church,” Eric DeBode of Catholic Worker said during a recent protest demonstration in front of the new cathedral.

“Our vision is that Jesus came to offer himself as a sign of hope and he did that by caring for the sick, spending time with lepers and suffering people, and standing with victims and offering himself as victim. He did not build churches.”

But supporters of the project note that the religious imagination has long expressed the infinite through the finite, transcendent reality through the physical senses. The cathedral, they hope, will inspire visitors toward service to others.

“When people gather together in this place to pray, to be united together, it is also a reminder that as we leave this place there’s a great responsibility to take care of others,” said Msgr. Kevin Kostelnik, pastor of the new cathedral.

“The cathedral is not only for archdiocesan liturgies, and events for our parishioners,” he said. “It also will be the central gathering place for the city to come in times of tragedy and, I believe, in times of joy. . . . This will be the sacred space that people come to.”

With the urge toward transcendence in mind, the archdiocese and design architect Jose Rafael Moneo of Madrid have set about erecting a monumental cathedral to last 300 to 500 years for the nation’s largest Catholic archdiocese.

“It becomes the meeting place with God . . . a journey to defuse ourselves from the noise of life, of the noise of the city and to be in a quiet place,” Kostelnik said.

Even now, as the cathedral rises from its massive 64,000-square-foot foundation--engineered to withstand major earthquakes--the extent of the project is dramatically apparent.

Its walls have reached heights of eight stories. Great concrete buttresses rise on either side of the planned nave, which will be a foot longer than that of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. On the floor below, a steel frame surrounds the spot where the great central altar will one day beckon the faithful.

“The dynamism of this cathedral has very much to do with the fact that the building incorporates surprises in its design,” said Hayden Salter, project designer with Moneo’s architectural firm.

“I don’t think it’s just caprice that none of the angles are 90 degrees. Each time you turn you don’t know where the space will flow.” As in the journey of faith itself, “you can’t anticipate what will be around the corner.”

The design is so geometrically complex that it could not have been built in the past using hand-drawn blueprints. Computer technology has made it possible to meet building tolerances so demanding that none of the handcrafted concrete forms may vary from the design by more than one-sixteenth of an inch. Ordinary projects allow variances at least twice that large.

The complexity and layering of space enhances the sense of mystery and wonder, said Nick Roberts, the cathedral project manger from the firm of Leo J. Daly.

“In a great, sacred building you always have the feeling that there is something beyond. The layering of the buttresses and space above the ambulatory . . . the complexity and depth of the space always fills one with wonder and awe.”

The grand scale and proportions of the building will be illuminated by sunlight radiating into the chapels and nave through windows made of 24,000 square feet of thinly veined Spanish alabaster. Sound within the building--the trumpeting of a great pipe organ, the voices of a choir, the spoken word--will reverberate and linger.

Stone, cedar, alabaster, copper, bronze and special white cement imported from Alborg, Denmark, to fashion the monumental 3,000-seat nave are all designed to coax worshipers into an awareness that they are, indeed, in a different place.

If the design works as intended, the scale, the sound, the textures of materials, even the weight of the door hardware and the sound of footsteps on the limestone flooring will all work together to sustain “an absolute contrast with the materials of the everyday,” Roberts said.

Outside, the layout of the 5.6-acre Cathedral Square is similarly intended to gently beckon worshipers and visitors on a spiritual path. Each step is to be a transition from the secular to the sacred.

Visitors will pass through a lower plaza, up a grand staircase, through the upper plaza and on toward great 5-ton bronze doors designed by artist Robert Graham. From there, they will pass into a 200-foot ambulatory that runs the length of the cathedral from east to west. There is a slight incline, heightening the sense of an upward journey. A right turn will place visitors in the huge nave. Its cedar ceiling will rise 85 feet above a 5-ton altar that Mahony designed.

“One of the most important design features is the sense of crossing a threshold into a space which is set apart from everyday life, but which at the same time refers back to the everyday life of the city,” Roberts said. “It’s the subtlety of that threshold that we’ve worked on a lot.”