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ROAMIN' CATHOLIC

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by Jim Holman.
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It's Just Big

A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW CATHEDRAL

By Christopher Zehnder

Duncan Gregory Stroik is a professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. A graduate of Yale University, where he received his Masters of Architecture degree, Stroik served as a designer for architect Allan Greenberg from 1987 to 1989 designing civic, institutional, collegiate and residential projects. In 1990, Stroik was invited to the University of Notre Dame to help form and implement a new architecture curriculum. Working with department chairman Thomas Gordon Smith and others, Stroik helped to form a program of Classical architecture and urbanism at the university. Stroik has also taught in Rome.

The Mission contacted Professor Stroik for his assessment of Jose Rafael Moneo's design for the new Los Angeles cathedral, Our Lady of the Angels.

Let us begin with the cathedral's exterior. What do you think of its design?

We have to applaud Cardinal Mahony for keeping the church downtown, placing it in a prominent site, giving it ample space with a plaza and a number of other functions which are important to connect the church with other Church ministries; I understand that there will be places for charitable works and places for meetings. I think it is unfortunate that a compromise could not be worked out for the cathedral to stay on its original site, because, in our tradition, a place is made sacred and is hallowed, not only by its dedication, but also by the many saints and people going through it.

It's wonderful that they've provided a public space, a plaza, for the cathedral. From the models, though, the plaza seems a bit private. The cathedral seems to step away from the city. The cathedral church, particularly of a very Catholic city like Los Angeles, should be seen as one of the public institutions of the city, and as the spiritual equivalent of the city hall or the court house.

Moneo seems to want the cathedral to be precisely that--private. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Moneo said, "I would like to offer a space where people feel more able to isolate themselves from daily life. I would like to allow for a chance to go to higher reflection."

Moneo sees the cathedral as more of a monastery. I think, while the church proper may be a place, not to be isolated, but to come into a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy, the way that one enters the cathedral should be open to the city. This does not mean that there should not be some kind of a threshold that we move across. It seems from the cathedral's design, there isn't a clear processional route from the street, into the plaza, and from the plaza to the cathedral."

Does the cathedral call attention to itself as holy place in the midst of the city?

This building is a very substantial building, about five or six stories in height; [but] how does this building compete with other buildings around it? It seems, at first glance, that more than being a place set apart, it fits in with what are, in general, rather banal, utilitarian 1960s and '70s office structures. The building does not have the image of a holy place or of a cathedral. The model does not give one the sense that it is a gate to heaven, or ladder to heaven, or the house of God.

This cathedral is meant to have the largest seating capacity of any American cathedral--I believe 2,800 people--and if that's so, that's probably bigger than most cathedrals in the world. Probably it needs to be much grander in height, inside and outside, but also it needs to be more prominent, it needs to have elements on the outside that give it monumentality. The utilitarian aesthetic of abstraction does not lend itself to creating a building with a monumental scale. It just becomes big.

[It is good] that the inside of the cathedral is something of a cruciform shape. [Yet, because] the modernist architect feels uncomfortable with the [symmetrical] purity of the cross, the cross is there, though it is deformed asymmetrically. I'm not sure if the cross will be perceived on the inside; clearly it's not perceived on the outside. Moneo's done a number of things to subvert the shape of the cross, by having the transepts taller and having light coming in from them, rather than having the sanctuary, or the area around the sanctuary taller. The exterior is an asymmetrical, functionalist aesthetic; it's a box which is trying to express the interior volumes, therefore we're left with a kind of sculptural mass, rather than an image of the Body of Christ or some other more latent icon, which historically churches have had.

In using an abstract aesthetic, it's hard to say much. Abstraction is inherently quiet and mute, so it will be difficult for this cathedral church to teach us anything about theology. The building itself is probably more notable for what it doesn't say than for what it does, and it would probably be quite acceptable to most Protestant churches. I wonder if this is the concrete equivalent of Schuler's Crystal Cathedral. Like Schuler's church, it is placed on the freeway, to be seen from the freeway, which is fine; but it seems that this building may look prominent at 65 m.p.h. But what about the middle scale, where you're driving slowly or walking? What about when you get right up to it? That's when it seems to really break down.

An interesting element of the cathedral design is the segregation of the side chapels from the nave. Whence does this design factor arise?

I don't know of any church documents that would support the segregation of devotional chapels from the body of the nave. In fact, it seems rather antinomial to separate devotion from the liturgy; don't images of the saints help us in our liturgy? Is it not only ourselves, but also all the saints who are worshipping with us and helping us? To separate things out is a functionalist way of looking at buildings.

Many people might feel unhappy with the Blessed Sacrament chapel being in a separate room, and, of course, there is a tradition in cathedral churches of having a separate chapel because of the great number of pilgrims coming into the churches. What is unfortunate here, is that the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, which is also a daily Mass chapel, as I understand it, seems quite hard to find from the body of the church. It becomes, in a certain way, one of these other side chapels. It should be given great prominence, there should be some way to indicate that there is the chapel of the Real Presence. By having these side chapels on the outside of the church, not 'cluttering up' or 'messing up' the purity of the inside of the church, may make the average faithful feel that the church is not a place of prayer, and is really only useful for large liturgies, ordinations, holy days, and so forth.

What notion should the interior space of a church convey? Does the cathedral convey this notion?

I think what one should say [when he enters a church] is, 'this is awesome, God is beyond us and above us.' There should be a sense of transcendence that ennobles and elevates the believer into that transcendence, and makes him feel a part of it. [The Los Angeles cathedral] is just big; it's just a big space rather than a transcendent space. In fact, I think it should be taller; for its width it's quite low. What we say in architecture is that it doesn't have human scale, there's nothing to relate to. And, of course, the forms are unrecognizable; they're simply parts of geometry, so we'll feel out of scale, uncomfortable in a room like that.

Hopefully they will spend a lot of time and money on beautiful adornments because the building itself is so iconoclastic. The architectural icons are so mute that we need some iconography, we need some images of the saints, we need floral images, images of creation, images of the heavens. We need something to relate to.

In the articles about the cathedral, much is made of the lighting of the cathedral. Is the lighting the kind that will be evocative of worship?

It looks like the lighting is indirect and much of it will be soft and coming from above, and that is very good. There's a sense of orienting us to the heavenly light. At least on the sides of the nave, the windows don't seem to be distracting, showing us the highway or something like that. Probably they will be studied so that they can naturally bring in a lot of light and make it a pleasant room, as far as the natural light goes.

The windows tend to be cut-outs rather than shapes of windows. In churches, of course, windows to the natural light symbolize windows to the spiritual light, and these openings seem to be more about big cut-outs than they seem to be about giving us any kind of metaphors. It's difficult in the abstract language of modernism to give any kind of metaphor or parable, because these things don't want to say anything than what they are; they merely want to be a wall or a ceiling, they don't want to be 'earth' and 'sky,' and so the window means to be merely something that brings in light.

One of the questions about the sanctuary is that, in a space that vast, how to you focus on the altar, the ambo for the proclamation of the Word, and on the cathedra of the bishop, then? The choir seems to have a focus because they have something behind them, some kind of a niche, but it's going to be quite difficult for the presider or the bishop, the person preaching, or the reader to be noticed in this vast room. Usually with a free-standing altar you'll have a baldachino over it, so you have a kind of church within a church, and that helps you to focus on that spot and on the presider.

The cathedral was supposed to have elements of the Mission style. Do you see any of that in the models?

There's nothing Mission about the church. One would expect much more iconography and color for a church in the diocese that has the largest number of Spanish speaking people in the country, and for a diocese that may become mainly Hispanic. Why isn't the church more colorful and full of icons and imagery and pattern and decoration? It's unfortunate that it doesn't reflect the great tradition of Spanish architecture, beloved in California.

You say that the cathedral is designed in the Modernist tradition. What is the Modernist architect trying to do?

I think the Modernist architect is interested in something which is simple and pure, devoid of any historical or human references. He's interested in the machine, its associations with progress and speed and movement. In Modernism there is a clear and conscious rejection of history and learning from history. There is the brave new world and the fact that the modern man is somehow different from previous men. That we have different problems today and these should be expressed. We no longer believe in other things, so this lack of belief must be expressed. If the Gothic cathedral was an architecture of Faith, of piety, Modernism tends to be an architecture of skepticism, of atheism, of, at best, agnosticism. The rejection of history was a rejection of the the Judeo-Christian civilization, and its art and architecture. The Modernist architect wants to do a sculptural building which has never been seen before, he wants to do something totally new each time, ex nihilo, which is impossible.

In choosing a Modernist architect, they have chosen an architect who is basing his work on the last 50 or 60 years of architecture, who's not delving into the last 3000 years of architecture. In a funny way, this building, though it's meant to be a building for the next millenium or the next century, it's clearly a building that's inspired by the 1960s. Already this building looks old-fashioned.

The church appears asymmetrical. Why does the Modernist prefer the asymmetrical?

Symmetricality is seen as a static order, so many Modernists have a proclivity for asymmetry, because that is seen as dynamic order. I like to think of a church symbolizing the Body of Christ, and like Christ's body, a church should be symmetrical. There are some axes, some minor axes [in Moneo's design], but there's a very careful subverting of those--they're not too clear or too strong. There's a certain amount of tension that all this creates in that main aisle that leads to the main altar, with the cross off center behind the altar.

This building will be very expensive to build. Everything is being very particularized; it's a very finicky building, really, as abstract as it looks and plain as it looks. It almost seems that things want to be unresolved. If any building should be resolved and give one a sense of harmony and beauty and the order of the universe, a church should be. It may be that we live in a heterogeneous world where, for many people, there are no certain truths, but clearly that's not what Christ's Church proclaims. The church should express harmony and allow us to rise above the asymmetricality of our lives, and should then send us out into the world better able to bring it more harmony.

Do you think Moneo consciously embraces this Modernist philosophy?

I think Moneo comes out of a Modernist tradition. He's very talented and quite successful, and wants to create a great masterpiece of Modernist architecture. But even if he has the right intentions, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to create a fitting place of worship using an architecture that is clearly drawn from a kind of Manichaen view of the world, or a view of humanity that is a-Christian, if not anti-Christian.

One can say, of the five architects that the jury chose [as finalists], that Moneo is the best one. He was the conservative choice. It's unfortunate that of the five architects they didn't have one with a traditionalist bent.

Did any traditionalist architects enter the competition?

There are lots of architects who are doing traditional work; there are even some traditional churches being built--Gothic, Classical, Mediterranean, and so forth. Before the competition architects were invited to submit their portfolios. Forty-six sent in their resumes and portfolios. Of those 46, a good six were traditionalists, well-known, internationally known architects, but none of those six were chosen [for the final competition]. This is not surprising, because the jurors were mainly theorists and historians, and a few architects of a modernist view. Very few, if any of the jurors, were practicing Catholics. It's an interesting issue, especially since a very well known architect from London, Demitri Porphyrios, was concerned that he was not considered because he is Greek Orthodox. But, in fact, none of the five architects who were chosen in the competition were practicing Catholics.

What do you think about the criticism of the Catholic Worker and others that the cardinal should not spend so much money on a new cathedral when it could be used for the poor?

While one is sympathetic with the Catholic Workers, and the good work that they do, the Catholic view should be that we build the beautiful building for God and we also feed his people. We do both. It's not either-or. I think the cardinal's correct in saying, we're spending this money, but it's not going to take away from what we're doing for the poor, and maybe we need to do more for the poor, for schools, or for evangelization.

Another point is that a public building, and most importantly, a church, has always been that place that everyone owns. The cathedral is for everyone in Los Angeles, the rich, the middle class, and the poor. What a great opportunity for the poor and the homeless to go into a place where they are elevated and ennobled! They need beauty as much as anyone else. They deserve beauty maybe even more than anyone else. Just because a church is in the inner city doesn't mean it needs to be a bunker, small and functional. No! it should be glorious, it should be wonderful, it should be the best room around! The poor should want to go there. It should inspire them to live a good life and to seek to better themselves. That is truly what Dorothy Day was all about: to give the poor the best.

This brings us back to the question, whether this cathedral will draw us in, invite us in, and once we're in there, will it draw our thoughts to heaven, or will it only make us focus on ourselves or what is happening right now. A good church, a beautiful cathedral takes us from the material world to the immaterial. Unfortunately for the modernist or for the modern man, the material is all we have; it limits us. And I feel that this church is very much a materialist church in the sense that all we have is the building and we're not drawn upward; the visible isn't leading us to the invisible.

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