Counter-proposal for the Cathedral of Los Angeles

Perhaps no other church-building endeavor in modern history has caused more controversy and consternation than the construction of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. And, with a pricetag of $250 million and a design aesthetic best described as Concrete Spaceship Nouveau, it's easy to understand the reasons behind the distress. I visited the building during my field trip week sojourn through the City of Angels:

Quaint, no? Interesting architecture does not an effective place of worship make. If the cross was not there, would you, O Casual Reader, realize that this was the cathedral church of the most populous diocese in the United States? I somehow doubt it. It does not speak in the architectural language of the Church. It is a mute building. It is not a Catholic building.

I put a pen to paper the other day in an attempt to come up with something a bit more appropriate, given the historical and built context of the city of Los Angeles. Now, I'm not saying this is the way the project should've looked, but I think it attempts some of the continuity in tradition that the built cathedral lacks.

Inspired both by the Art Deco of downtown Los Angeles and the historic Spanish Colonial style of the California Missions, this design attempts to merge the massing of a Gothic cathedral with the flavor of Southern California. One of my perennial favorites, Bertram Goodhue (who did a fair bit of work in California himself), provided inspiration for the overall form of the imagined cathedral.

Liverpudlian Lutyens

In my estimation, one of the great tangential tragedies of the Second World War and the Great Depression it followed, was the end it put to good traditional design projects. Funds for projects became scarcer during the economic downturn, and after the European modernist architects had been dispersed in the postwar era, many noble project were simply discarded in favor of cheaper, more industrial, more modern, designs. The most monumental victim to this trend was Sir Edwin Lutyens' design for the Catholic cathedral of Liverpool.

Plans for a Cathedral in Liverpool date to the mid-nineteenth century, when the Catholic population swelled due to the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. Edward Welby Pugin, son of the preeminent Gothicist A.W.N. Pugin, was called on to design the structure. He finished only the Lady Chapel, which now serves as a parish church in its own right. Pugin's design was predictably Gothic, and would have more or less matched the style of the Anglican cathedral, which is quite fine in its own right.

As a visual aside, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish master of the Arts and Crafts Movement, submitted his own design to the Anglican design competition, which is not without its merits. It has a muscular, sculpted quality about it that one can find echoes of in the architecture of Bertram Goodhue in early Twentieth-Century America.

I digress. Back to Lutyens. Lutyens was commissioned in 1930 to design the Catholic cathedral on a site not more than a half mile from the then newly-constructed Neo-Gothic Anglican cathedral by Giles Gilbert Scott (shown in the first image). Lutyen's proposal was a massive, vaguely Byzantine structure that would have been the second-largest church in the world. The dome would've been the world's largest, outdoing St. Peter's by some thirty feet. Below are two images showing the proposed cathedral in its urban setting. In the first, you can clearly see the architectural challenge it would have been to Scott's Gothic Anglican cathedral.

Thankfully, Lutyens' original scale model, in wood, survived the War and is preserved to this day. The model more clearly shows the immense proportions of his grand design.

Impressive, no? Lutyens, in the tradition of the great cathedral-builders of old, most likely believed that this project would outlive him for several hundred years. Though it is very unlikely to be built as planned, the sheer grandeur and subtle artistry involved in such a mature design are likely to continue to inspire architects. I think the real power in Lutyens' design was his ability to be grand without being gaudy. There is a control and restraint in the design that I think is admirable.

Lest we end this post on a high note, we must continue with the telling of the story. Lutyens' design was scrapped after the war due to its astronomical costs (estimates of what it would take to build such a structure today typically run into the £990,000,000 range), and a third design competition was held. The winning built design for the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King is shown below.

I can hear the Anglicans laughing from here. 

The Crystal Cathedral is Converting

There is perhaps no greater symbol of American Evangelical mega-churchmanship than the bombastic Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. It is interesting to note, then, the recent news that the Crystal Cathedral has been sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, for eventual use as the diocese's new cathedral. It seems that the operator of the building, Crystal Cathedral Ministries, had gone bankrupt and needed to sell their property and building. At the same time, the Diocese of Orange was in great need for a larger cathedral. So, the acquisition of the property is fortuitous for both parties involved.

As a student of architecture and a critic of modernism, I tend to dislike the building itself. It is impressive structurally, and the spire is quite nice, but it will take a lot of work (and apparently several million dollars) to renovate the cavernous, auditorium-like space into something appropriate for Catholic worship. But, if the Church can turn the pagan Pantheon into a suitable place for the mass, I have no doubt that a temple to modernism and Evangelicalism can likewise be converted.

The Daily Niblet: Jesus, the first Gothic architect

Yes, candid reader, I have resurrected the "daily niblet" as a way to post some more or less intriguing - but brief - errant thoughts without bogging you down in more than three paragraphs or so. Expect meatier niblets than those of the past, but nothing more filling than your average appetizer. Firstly, from the great thinker G.K. Chesterton:

"Christ prophesied the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs) objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem. He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out." Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out." - Orthodoxy, Ch. 7 The Eternal Revolution

Pictured below is the great Cathedral of Strasbourg, France.

Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains, Cincinnati

Lest anyone think that I harbor a grudge against any remotely modern church architecture, I submit to you these images of the Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was remodeled in the 50s, I do believe, and the result is pleasing in my opinion. The mosaic/fresco/image behind the altar is a very nice piece of Art Deco design. The remodel was clearly a modernization, but it respected the history and iconography of the church, unlike many of the construction projects in the following decades. (Images taken from cincyimages.com)