Our Lady of the Freeways: is Los Angeles's new Cathedral worth the price?

Commonweal, Feb 28, 2003 by Jack Miles

The cathedral thus has the aspect of an impregnable fortress, yet this fortress--however uninviting to the pedestrian--has a mysterious, cloistered beauty when seen at night through the windshield of a car westbound on the freeway or eastbound on Temple Street. It is as if Moneo, former chair of the architecture department at Harvard, chose to make virtue of necessity and to design a building whose external allure would be directed toward the driver rather than toward the walker. Rather than fight the L.A. way of doing things, he embraced it. And I suspect that the low, unprepossessing pedestrian gate may be the eminent Spaniard's way of slyly building into his formal design an oddity that, de facto, affects all the great cathedrals of Europe. I refer to the fact that the visitor never enters these monuments through the imposing main entrance but always through some undistinguished little side entrance. If this derogation from grandeur is to be anticipated in any latter-day cathedral, then why not build it in?

In any case, just inside that gate or just up from the parking garage, one arrives at a modest-sized plaza with a fountain ("I will give you living water" in all the languages of the world). Two tall, broad staircases lead up from this entry plaza to the much larger main plaza. Looking up the right staircase, the visitor's gaze is directed toward a gigantic clerestory window jutting upward at an angle from the facade of the cathedral and quadrisected by a Latin cross. Looking up the left staircase, one sees the cathedral's three-story-square entrance, which is located, unexpectedly, not in the center of the structure but at its left edge. Here stand (rather than hang) the spectacular bronze doors of sculptor Robert Graham, surmounted by a tympanum with an eight-foot statue of Our Lady of the Angels herself, the signature image of the cathedral and, eventually perhaps, even of the city: Our Lady of the Angels as Our Lady of Los Angeles (or, bilingually, Our Lady of Los Angeles).

When the design for the cathedral was unveiled, one comment made on it--a comment offered, it seemed, as a boast--was that it contained no right angle. In this, the all-angles cathedral seemed a riposte to Gehry's all-curves concert hall, under construction a block away. By being massive without ever being quite square, Moneo's cathedral evokes, for me, the many moments when the fortress-like Romanesque churches and monasteries of Europe, for all their solidity, seem a bit handmade and "off." In any case, once up the left staircase and through the bronze doors, the visitor is enclosed in a cool, high ambulatory running the length of the south wall of the cathedral from the front left corner to the rear. Because the floor slopes noticeably upward as one approaches the back corner, while the ambulatory itself gradually narrows, one has the faint sensation--begun, in fact, as soon as one begins to mount the staircase from the fountain plaza--of climbing toward a hilltop shrine, past side chapels that face outward rather than inward as in a classic cathedral.