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

'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.

Though the walled complex is permeable, it firmly defines the visitor's scope. From the street, you move through a long, broad opening in the carillon wall with its 36 bells. Behind a fountain rise two swathes of steps. They are oriented either to the cathedral and the sharply angled, gorgeously finished campanile or to the plaza with olive trees and other symbolic plants. To the east are a conference/meeting/gift shop centre and a clergy residence. These two casualties of reduced budgets are inferior in both appearance and finish to the cathedral, but they do create a strong civic edge along busy Hill Street.

Parishioners walk west through Robert Graham's 25-ton bronze doors crowned by a gigantic figure of the Madonna surrounded by a huge halo of gold gilt. The doors include images ranging from Native American to Tai Chi; the Madonna's 'eyes, lips and nose convey Asian, African and Caucasian features' and her long hair is braided in rural Latina tradition, all to androgynous effect. In a pre-literate society, the narratives enshrining doors, openings and columns were rich, clear messages laced with nuance and humour. (Moneo has quoted Victor Hugo as saying that books killed cathedral architecture.) Here, the messages are blurred and then reduced to cartoons of political correctness, perhaps addressing another order of cultural illiteracy. In any case, they undermine the strength of the architects' vision. As does the cathedra [the bishop's chair]. With its multiple woods and craftsman aesthetic, it does not set up a dialectic between forms but rather feels alien. In contrast, the cherry pews, designed by the Moneo /Daly team, resonate quietly with the design intent.

Beyond the doors, there is not the expected narthex but a broad, gently rising ambulatory that flanks the nave. Because of the angled walls, as you move toward the back there are sudden vertical glimpses of the nave and even of the north ambulatory beyond, similar to walking through a medieval town and seeing slices of a cathedral through narrow streets. In the ambulatory, as the word suggests, it's all about moving. But it is the nave that matters, and it is Moneo's master stroke. The nave is about being. By reversing the orientation of the chapels to face the ambulatory, where noise is more frequent, he allows the worshipper to focus on the altar. The change, somewhat like exposing part of the belly of the nave -- a spatial move -- conspires to order temporally and ennoble the procession of both laity and clergy as each chapel, daylit from mysterious sources above, invites repose. The frequent openings to the nave also address the human condition of being a tourist, tending a baby, or making your way in and out of the church, both physically and spiritually. An asymmetrically placed seventeenth-century reredos terminating the ambulatory signals a reverse in direction and you turn to face the airy largesse of the 333ft (101 m) long nave. The path to the open altar area, well below the floor levels of the side ambulatories, leads downward, so that pews around the altar are higher, subverting the convention of an elevated chancel segregated from the laity.

Just as daylight plays a central role in the nave, so does sound. The long march of tapestries by John Nava along the nave walls not only portray the diverse communion of saints, but also act as sound absorbers. To reduce returning sound being muddied, the rear wall to the baptistry was opened with angled cuts and a tapestry hung, resulting in unusual visual links to the space. The M9neodesigned light fixtures, each with three lamps presumably symbolizing the Holy Trinity, are also loudspeakers, housed in the trumpet shapes of each fixture's body. However, the pieces are too intrusive and there are so many big light bulbs that together they act like an undimmable cutting plane suspended 20ft (6m) above the floor.

Where St Vibiana's was a place to run from during an earthquake, the cardinal's requirement of creating not only spiritual but physical refuge -- the local building code term is 'continuity of service'--seeks a degree of permanence unheard of in ephemeral Los Angeles. Designed to withstand magnitude 8.2, a catastrophic earthquake, the cathedral rides as a unit on rubber and steel base isolators, primarily supporting the walls, while Teflon-bearing sliders on flawless faces of stainless steel support the nave floor. A moat permits lateral movement up to 27ft (8m) in any direction. The building of the church was raised through private donations and it will be maintained through the sale of burial crypts and niches in the subterranean mausoleum, priced from $50 000 to $3 million.

On an urban scale, the cathedral inserts something startling in the fabric of Los Angeles: a religiously oriented place in a city unused to such strange urban elements. Nave, the main gathering place in a church, comes from the same Latin, navis, things nautical and naval. A ship cuts through water, a foreign element, but one that the ship is designed to inhabit with grace, fortitude and speed. The nave is also where a body of believers gains grace and fortitude (if not speed), and Moneo's wood ceiling looks strikingly like the bottom of a boat. To suggest that the cathedral campus should be more-urbanistically inclusive ignores or misreads its primary function, the act of gathering by a body of believers. The new plaza with its fountains, landscaping, bright yellow and orange plastic chairs scattered near the cafe, loins civic spaces nearby, such as those of the Dorothy Chandler Music Center, the Colburn School of Music, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Disney Concert Hall, which will open this autumn. And of course, LA is on easy terms with all things retail. But it may take time to learn to operate this new old tool, a cathedral close which invites the Angeleno to embrace an identity larger than being solely a consumer, whether of goods or culture.

RELATED ARTICLE: Architect

Rafael Moneo, Madrid

Project team

Rafael Moneo, Hayden Salter, David Campbell, Alberto Nicolau, Lori Bruns, Mariano Molina, Christoph Schmid

Associate architect

Leo A. Daly Architects, Los Angeles

Project team

Nick Roberts, Jaime Garcia, John Williams

Structural engineer

Nabih Youssef & Associates

Mechanical engineer

Ove Arup & Partners California

Acoustic consultant

Dennis Psoletti

Landscape architect

Campbell & Campbell

Liturgical art consultant

Richard vosko

Photographs

John E. Linden/ARCAID