To Most U.S. Architecture Critics, New L.A. Cathedral Is a Triumph

Three weeks after its opening, Los Angeles’ Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo, is enjoying, with few exceptions, critical thumbs up.

The Wall Street Journal’s David Littlejohn called the structure “the most impressive large interior space ever built in Los Angeles”--a building that has “nothing to do with the entertainment industry and very little to do with the wealthy Anglo businessmen and politicians who have decided since the 1920s what this sprawl of a city would look like.” The architect, he wrote, created an exterior that’s “intentionally blank and introspective,” encouraging people to penetrate the enclosure to discover the “wondrous, light-filled world inside.”

John King of the San Francisco Chronicle observed that the structure won’t single-handedly “bring life to a moribund downtown, as boosters claim, or serve as the town square for this formless city of 3.7 million people.” Still, the cathedral, is “a triumph that conveys the essence of both religious faith and great architecture,” he said, and possibly “the most significant building to open in the United States this year.”

Richard Lacayo of Time magazine labeled the cathedral, the first built in the United States in 25 years, a “signal event ... with roots simultaneously in the here and now and in the sunlit antiquity of the Mediterranean rim.” The ground-level church “lacks the imposing central portal that has signified a great church from the time of Gothic cathedrals,” he lamented, “but when the light falls across the great central space ... it provides exactly the great climax that [Moneo’s] long, hushed corridor promised.”

Alan Hess of the San Jose Mercury News wrote that Moneo has designed a “landmark-class building” distinguished by “clean, sharp-edged abstraction.” The “most riveting” piece of artwork, says Hess: “Robert Graham’s two 25-ton bronze doors that depict a variety of multicultural images and contrast well with the entryway’s concrete walls.”

The New Yorker, however, was less impressed. Observing how difficult it is to make a landmark in Los Angeles--a city that is “relentlessly horizontal”--Paul Goldberger compared the cathedral (“a big, horizontal mass”) to the Beverly Center or that blue glass whale, the Pacific Design Center. Frank Gehry’s “swooping forms” at the Walt Disney Concert Hall nearby are more “conventionally cathedral-like,” he maintained.

If anything about the building’s exterior stirs the emotions, Goldberger suggested, it’s the 2 1/2-acre plaza, which “manages to be a true public place--the poor man’s Getty Center, which is not an insignificant achievement.” And, despite “dreary representational art” and “fussy chandeliers,” the interior is “a sumptuous modern space.”

All in all, he concluded Moneo has made a “valiant effort to render sacred space on a large scale, and he has done it without tricks or gimmicks.”