Form Follows Values

Los Angeles finally has a spiritual heart. That’s the assumption, at least, behind the monumental new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. But exactly what kind of spiritual heart is it?

Rising at the corner of downtown’s Grand Avenue and Temple Street, the cathedral’s stark concrete form stands at the intersection of the city’s cultural future. Its enormous footprint--1 foot longer than Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral--ranks it among the largest cathedrals in America. Its towering facade, with its dynamic cross-shaped altar window, looms over a vast plaza that is clearly intended as a communal focal point in a city that has few.

But the cathedral’s ambitions are far more sweeping. Designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo, it aims to pick up the historical thread that stretches back through centuries of church design and tie it to the present. To do so, Moneo drew on a range of traditional precedents. He then reworked them for a contemporary world. The result is a structure steeped in memory and yet wholly new.

There has never been a fixed formula for designing churches, and debates about their ideal form have raged through centuries.

What we often think of as the typical Roman Catholic church evolved during early Christianity and the Romanesque period, when the Latin cross plan--with its central nave and shorter transept--was first conceived as a representation of the crucifixion of Christ. It reached its apogee in great Gothic cathedrals like Chartres or Notre Dame, which were seen as the physical embodiment of Christ, the link between God and man. The soaring vertical lines of columns, pilasters and buttresses drew the eye up to the heavens, and, just as important, signaled the presence of the divine on earth.

But medieval cathedrals, built up over centuries, were often a patchwork of inconsistent styles, a fact that is summed up by Chartres’ oddly mismatched spires--one built in the 12th century, the other, taller and more intricately detailed, built after a fire more than 250 years later.

To the Renaissance mind, such disorder was incapable of expressing the harmony of God’s universe with real clarity. In the 15th century architects such as Leon Battista Alberti, Donato d’Agnolo Bramante and, later, Michelangelo began to articulate an aesthetic based on Platonic forms. Alberti, in particular, devised a system of geometric proportions that were remarkably modern in spirit. The dome, meanwhile, became the embodiment of cosmic order and purity.

Such advances produced a philosophical rupture in how churches should be designed. Pope Carlo Borromeo condemned the circle as a pagan form in about 1572 and urged a return to the Latin cross plan. But as Renaissance scholar Rudolf Wittkower pointed out, architects continued to push the boundaries of church design. And during the next few centuries, many of the great churches and cathedrals were an attempt to resolve the conflict between these two forms--the Latin cross and the centralized dome--and their symbolic meaning.

Nowhere was that struggle more visible than in the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica. The seat of the Vatican was designed by Bramante in the early part of the 16th century in a Greek cross plan, with four symmetrical bays. Antonio da Sangallo proposed adding a long nave, which would have destroyed the basilica’s symmetry.

Later, Michelangelo reasserted the design’s cohesion, emphasizing the structure’s vertical lines to unify the body of the basilica with the dome. Finally, Carlo Maderno returned to the Latin cross plan, lengthening the nave and completing the St. Peter’s design seen today.

Meanwhile, others were pushing such ideas a step forward. In Venice’s Il Redentore, Andrea Palladio anchored a central nave with a bulbous dome. Seen from the main entry, the interior’s vaulted nave dominates the view, and only as you move farther into the building does the relationship between the nave and the domed space become apparent. Relating the notion of unity to movement through space was a breakthrough. Man, in effect, becomes part of the composition.

Since then, we have seen the delirious geometric forms of the Italian Baroque churches, the darker, brooding Spanish version, and the more pompous monuments of neoclassicism.

But in modern times the most radical challenge to the conventional church plan came from the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), whose reforms were intended to adjust church doctrine to contemporary reality. Those reforms were interpreted by architects as a move away from the basic nave and transept pattern toward a more communal experience, with the congregation wrapped more closely around the central altar.

The architecture of most modern Catholic cathedrals is an expression of that ideological shift. In San Francisco, for example, Pier Luigi Nervi’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, completed in 1970, virtually ignores previous church models. Square in plan, its massive concrete pillars rise up from the corners to support a soaring roof. The altar is set along one side of the square, with the congregation fanning out in front of it. The result is a structure shaped by Machine Age notions of modernity as much as by any symbols of Christianity. Its most recognizable icon is its roof, which has been compared with a bishop’s hat.

In Southern California, however, the most dramatic innovations in church design were made by architects working for evangelical ministries, not for the Catholic Church. The most famous of these were commissioned by Robert Schuller, who began his career preaching at a drive-in theater in Orange County.

In 1959, Schuller asked Modernist Richard Neutra to design a chapel that would reflect the suburban lifestyle of his flock. The result was a sleek Modernist chapel with an enormous sliding glass wall that opened to an outdoor parking lot. Visitors could sit in the comfort of their parked cars and listen to sermons on outdoor speakers, then zip away without ever entering the church.

Schuller expanded that vision 20 years later, when he hired Philip Johnson and John Burgee to design the Crystal Cathedral, an immense, star-shaped shed of shimmering, reflective glass set in a sea of parking. The cathedral, which looms over Neutra’s chapel, was designed as much as a backdrop for the evangelist’s television sermons as a house of worship, but its altar, slightly off axis from the nave, allowed Schuller to preach to those outside through a 90-foot-tall, sliding mechanical door.

In many ways, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels can be read as an attack on the media-age culture that spawned Schuller’s vision. Towering above the 101 Freeway, which snakes by 35 feet below, the cathedral’s only nod to the car is its faceted, concrete campanile, which serves as a visual marker to passing commuters. The cathedral’s grand facade looms over the plaza, where the crowds can gather for outdoor services, much like at St. Peter’s. Parking, meanwhile, is buried underground, below the archdiocese offices that frame the plaza’s eastern edge.

But Moneo’s design is more than a conscious return to earlier precedents. It is an attempt to create a spiritual sanctuary shielded from the corruption and noise of contemporary culture. In medieval times, churches flowed with the lifeblood of the city. They were often chaotic places, their aisles functioning as a refuge for the destitute.

Moneo’s cathedral, though it is in the heart of downtown, is more cloistered. Its plaza is only accessible through gates along Temple Street or from the underground parking structure. Inside, the cathedral has an aura of monastic seclusion.

That sense of isolation is reinforced by the cathedral’s layout, which draws inspiration from classical Modern precedents. A half-century ago, for example, the great Modernist architect Le Corbusier conceived his Ronchamp Chapel near Belfort, France, as part of a drawn-out pilgrimage. The chapel’s sculptural form, with its swooping roof, comes into view as visitors mount the hill, moving around it toward the entry.

Moneo’s design internalizes that diagram. To do so, it turns the traditional church inside out. Rather than enter from the end of the nave, visitors arrive at the cathedral’s altar end, via the plaza. From there, a long ambulatory leads past the side chapels to the back of the church. As one moves along the ambulatory, the walls slightly converge, and views open up between the chapels into the main worship space. Only as you reach the end do you turn and see the full scale of the space, its cavernous form flanked on both sides by enormous concrete pillars.

The idea is to extend the distance between outer and inner worlds. In effect, Moneo is asking the worshiper to leave the noise of contemporary culture behind and enter a more peaceful union with God.

But in another sense, that notion of movement through time is thoroughly modern. If Palladio’s visual tricks follow a series of set points and Le Corbusier’s procession is conceived of as part of a fluid landscape, Moneo’s cathedral suggests a precisely framed narrative journey. The building’s asymmetrical forms pull the eye forward, opening up a sequence of views that are cinematic in nature.

It is in the main sanctuary, finally, that Moneo strives to come to terms with the cathedral’s symbolic meaning. Much as the Renaissance architect tried to resolve the conflict between the traditional Latin cross plan and the geometric purity of the circle, Moneo’s design is an effort to reconcile the tension between traditional forms and the more informal layout of post-Vatican II cathedrals.

To that end, the bulk of the pews are set along the main nave, facing the altar. More seating flanks the altar on either side, where the transept would traditionally be located. Using this layout, Moneo is able to maintain the sense of intimacy prescribed by the Second Vatican Council while retaining the memory of the Latin cross plan.

As such, Our Lady of the Angels has an aura of formality that St. Mary’s Cathedral, for example, lacks in San Francisco. Unlike Nervi, Moneo refuses to let go of the thread that binds him to his spiritual past. His interest lies in the long arc of history, in reconciling the conflicts that periodically rock the church as it attempts to adapt to changing realities. It is an evolutionary strategy rather than a radical surge forward.

It is in that sense that Moneo’s cathedral echoes the great works of earlier church architects. Moneo’s design shows no patience for those who forget the past. Yet it is firmly grounded in the present. Its ability to transcend those differences is the cathedral’s most remarkable insight.

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Nicolai Ouroussoff is The Times’ architecture critic.