City of Angels: Rafael Moneo's new cathedral for Los Angeles affirms and reinterprets the Catholic balancing act between the physical and the divine

Architectural Review, The, March, 2003 by Barbara Lamprecht

'Thou has ordered all things in measure arid number and weight' (Solomon 11:2)

The most moving art in the Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles is the faint stains of holy oil on the concrete walls in the nave, traces of the dedication rites witnessed by over 3000 people last September. Fanning out from the altar, priests walked to 12 locations, and with their bare palms drew two lines, the axis mundi, on the concrete. Today those cross-shaped drips and smears mark the walls whose golden adobe colour recalls California missions.

It was the human hand which affirmed the space as sacred, a physical act in a spiritual space. Yet not until the walls were pristine were they worthy of being disfigured. Ensuring that the cathedral's exposed concrete walls would be perfect for a ritual dating back to the fourth century was no less sacramental and certainly no less physical. The even colour and crack-free texture of the walls are so precise, because hydration and curing were stringently controlled. Concrete trucks were hosed down with cold water and aggregate was cooled before it entered a mix of ice and water. Pouring began as early as 3am to counteract the sun's heat, and formwork consisted of double thicknesses of plastic coated plywood, with edges mitred and sanded to accommodate over 800 unique corner conditions, since no wall meets another at 90 degrees. Fast-track construction began in October 1998, less than five years from start to final dedication.

Designed by Rafael Moneo, with Los Angeles-based Leo A. Daly as executive architect, the new church is home to the nation's largest, most ethnically diverse diocese and is the first cathedral to be built in America in three decades. Moneo's design maintains important architectural and Catholic liturgical traditions, such as the procession of the faithful or the role of light in apprehending God. It is particularly successful in addressing that very Catholic balancing act between the physical (the cross, the body and blood of Christ, the congregants) and the symbolic: the unseen God, the act of faith. It also responds to the objectives of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), whose radical ideas about the laity/clergy hierarchy and the need to manifest the direct relationship between God and humankind carry profound physical consequences for architecture.

By harnessing contemporary technology and with an updated religious brief, Moneo was free to reinterpret these traditions. The church shows hallmarks of Modernism, but its monumental blocky forms, especially on the east end, have much in common with eleventh-century Romanesque churches. Huge reinforced-concrete shear walls, shingled in places, introduce a sense of human scale and frankly express the masonry's weight and force, though steel trusses are concealed. This is no Gothic church seeking to negate stone to create a diaphanous skeleton. And in contrast to most churches of any period, the pitched and warped nave roof, 95ft (29m) tall at its highest point, is some 30ft (9m) lower than the side chapels. The nave's irregular plan splays out at the altar to include the shallow transepts. Some walls stand as tall as 100ft (30.5m) with no intermediate supports and taper in width from one to five feet. (Static Renaissance single-point perspective has no place here.)

The design also recalls Early Christian basilica churches in Ravenna, whose plain squat external volumes are far less important than the decorated interior, the Civitas Dei. But even on the new interior, Moneo did not employ the artifice of mosaic glass tiles, intended to transform two-dimensionally flat or badly finished basilica walls. Instead he assembled a palette of finished concrete for walls, cherry for the pews, cedar and fir for the ceiling and golden jana limestone paving. Over 27000 square ft (1580 sq m) of alabaster protected by a ventilated dual-pane system (specially devised by the architects and Ove Arup, Los Angeles) acts as a prism dictating that light be ambient and gentle. There is plenty of historical precedent for the use of alabaster, including Moneo's own Miro Foundation building in Majorca (AR February 1996)-- also, as he notes, home of Father Junipero Serra, father of the California missions. Alabaster can be found in tiny openings high in the walls of small Romanesque churches, belov ed of Moneo. Typically, however, such ancient material is now almost opaque because of its intolerance to heat when left exposed. But with current technology, it can be transformed into great walls of light that will remain translucent. This, then, is not the ecstatic stained-glass light narrating saints' lives that Abbe Suger sought for his new abbey at Saint Denis in 1140. Colour in the cathedral will come from the clerical costumes, as the stained-glass figures metaphorically jump out from their windows to move among the congregation.

The city's former cathedral, St Vibiana's, was not only severely damaged in the 1994 earthquake but languished in the lowlands near Skid Row. When controversy prevented its demolition, the building was sold. With Moneo's urging, the archdiocese seized an opportunity to buy a parking lot sited at the one of the most prominent and highest downtown locations, the kind of sites Chartres, Santiago de Compostela and Lincoln cathedrals dominate. Overlooking the Hollywood freeway, Moneo compares the primary city artery to the rivers that defined European cities such as Notre Dame. The church also faces a belching government plant, but he envisaged that it would be gone in a mere century.