Description

Despite its extensive sprawl, Los Angeles has over the last few decades undertaken initiatives to strengthen its inner-city areas. The new cathedral just south of Hollywood Freeway is a further initiative in this direction. Surrounded by wide roads – subjecting it to a constant 75 decibels day and night – the church stands at the upper end of a site that slopes gently from west to east, with the cardinal’s residence and diocese curacy located at the lower end. A large plaza, 8,100 square metres in size, enclosed by retaining walls and raised planting mediates between the buildings.

The decision to divide the site into three parts with the cathedral positioned at the west end makes it difficult to place the altar in front of the east wall. To make this possible, a new typology of processional architecture has been devised in which the visitors make their way first along and up the sides of the building before returning back down the centre of the cathedral.

One ascends to the plaza and stands in front of a monumental structure cast in concrete pigmented the distinctive yellowish colour of adobe. The horizontal sections of wall look like shingles laid one over the other. The entrance to the church is marked by a sculpture. The central nave measures 101.65 metres in length. To the north and south it is flanked by a series of full-height side chapels, each side with an ambulatory that runs behind them. Unlike most church plans, the niches are turned outwards, allowing the main nave to remain the centre of attention between the baptistry and presbytery, between the pool for baptismal submersion and the space around the red marble altar. The floor is paved with sandstone, the ceiling made of cedar and douglas fir, and the pews and the organ of cherry.

The load-bearing rear and side walls of the side chapels allow huge curtain-like surfaces of precious alabaster to be suspended on the outside walls. Light shines through these translucent surfaces, illuminating the ambulatories and the tall narrow spaces between the side chapels as well as deep into the main nave. Slightly offset from the central axis and arranged high up in the rear wall is a glazed “jewel box” that projects both inwards and outwards and features a giant mullion and transom, which cuts the figure of the cross into the morning light.

Los Angeles was founded by Iberian Franciscans and their mission stations influence the form of the church on the freeway. Although the Cathedral is demonstratively processional in its architecture, it does attempt to achieve a balance between the paradoxical principles of axial and centralised arrangements. Its basic figure is cruciform with a nave and transept; the pews and chairs surround the altar on three sides. In its capacity for creating community, the architecture is both monumental and functional.

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.