A cathedral grows up in the city
By ARTHUR JONES
Los Angeles
Fr. Richard Vosko placed his hands on the burgundy marble altar in
the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and looked out 300 feet to the rear of
Los Angeles new ecclesia mater (mother church).
Then the Albany diocesan priest raised his hands. Slowly he
brushed them together -- to rid them of the dust from the thick protective
plastic cover blue taped to the 10- by 8-foot marble rectangle that was strewn
with schematic drawings, manila folders and satchels.
Five months from now, on Labor Day, in the Sept. 2 opening moments
of the dedicatory Mass at the $200 million-and-rising edifice, Cardinal Roger
Mahony will place his hands on this same altar, polished and dust free, and
gaze down the football-field long church at 3,000 dignitaries from California,
Washington, Rome and beyond. (Six hundred of them will be on chairs brought in
for the occasion.)
This day -- stretching away from the altar in all directions --
the church is a jumble of sawn wood, half-tiled floor, curling cables, crates
of fixtures, weird lamps dangling 45 feet from above, and workmen clattering
their way through the final stages of constructing the earthquake-proof
replacement for the earthquake-cracked 19th-century, 500-seat St.
Vibianas four blocks away.
If the cardinal is the man with a new cathedral, Vosko is the U.S.
Catholic churchs pre-eminent cathedral man. He is not an architect --
that challenge in Los Angeles went to Spains José Rafael Moneo.
Vosko, in a phrase, is a designer of sacred space.
He has 10 U.S. cathedral renovations notched on his Uniball Vision
Ultrafine pen, plus Los Angeles.
Voskos job is to place within Moneos space -- and
theres plenty of it, indoors and out -- $30 million worth of furnishings
and art (not all that money has yet been raised). Theres very
little in the building thats going to call attention to itself,
said the priest-artist. He has a free hand, allowing for the five Cs that
revolve around everyone connected with the initial five-year-long project:
concepts, cardinal, cost, critics and congregation.
Concepts and the cardinal are intertwined. This is Mahonys
cathedral. Hes totally hands-on. If it doesnt work
its his fault. Costs and critics are another twosome. The local Catholic
Worker community has constantly and correctly questioned these enormous outlays
in a city known for the sheer mass of its poor and immigrant populations.
In the final analysis, what a cathedral becomes rests in the hands
of its varying congregations, the folks who will make the place holy. It may be
a decade before anyone can truly gauge how Angelenos have responded to it as a
church to make their own.
Vosko has to help make that happen.
Through an adobe portal
The five-and-a-half acre site is bordered to the north by the
constant traffic hum (reverberation is a problem) of State Highway 101 -- the
Hollywood Freeway, and to the west, south and east by city streets Grand,
Temple and Hill respectively. The two-and-a-half acre plaza is laid out and
partly planted. It can be reached either through the parking garage, or off
Temple through an adobe portal strung with ancient bells from the old San
Fernando Mission.
Immediately inside the plaza, theres the Lita
Albuquerque-designed welcoming pool and waterfall. From Mahonys selection
of seven scriptural sources, Vosko chose the Samaritan woman at the well.
I am the living water will be inscribed around the fountain in the
42 languages spoken in the archdiocese. The Native Americans unique
contribution is Kumeyaay artist Johnny Bear Contreras The Spirit of
the Earth, a myth-laden sculpture.
Overall, the church is finished. Its promoters make much of its
adobe coloring and shingled effect that provides light-and-shadowed variety to
its otherwise plain sun-baked exterior elevations. The cathedral offices, the
cardinals residence and rectory above the parking lot on the eastern edge
of the cathedral plaza are darker hues, closer to graham cracker crust-colored.
From here cathedral rector Msgr. Kevin Kostelnik will operate the parishs
social outreach through a street-level door on Temple. In this complex, too,
theres a café that overlooks the plaza.
In the cathedrals façade there is still a yawning
gap: the south portal where the colossal 30-foot tall, 50,000-pound
hydraulically operated main bronze doors will be installed. Designed by Robert
Graham (who did the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial in Washington, D.C.), they
were delayed a month by a bronze-workers strike.
If the actuality works as well as the mock-up, the light and
shadow through a hole in the structure above her head will give an impressive
halo effect to the statue of Our Lady crowning the doors. Grahams
sculpture depicts a no-nonsense, bare forearmed Virgin with a welcoming,
workaday next-door neighbor persona.
Lalo Garcias proposed rosebush-surrounded Our Lady of
Guadalupe Shrine on the grass facing the freeway traffic may be a head-turner
during car-crawling commuter hours.
Moneos angular moderne structure defies convention in
a couple of major ways. Cathedral main entrances generally are centered at the
rear of the church for easy access and processional purposes. People enter
facing the altar.
Our Lady of the Angels is entered through that main portal to the
south side of the altar and down a 300-foot-long corridor lined on one side by
shrines and on the other by a plain wall. (Vosko wants an elegant, if subtle,
illustrated history of the church in California scrolled along that 300-foot
corridor wall. In the north corridor, along with the Stations of the Cross,
theres a room Vosko has earmarked as an art gallery for small traveling
exhibits.)
No stained glass windows
There are no stained glass windows in the 330-foot long church
with its geometrically patterned wooden ceiling that soars from 80 feet at the
rear above the baptistry to 104 feet at its highest point, over the human
scale altar cross. The main aisle appears offset. Its a trick of
the eye.
The cathedral is glazed -- if thats the correct word -- with
thin alabaster sheets that cast an even, suffuse glow on the construction
turmoil inside. Below the main church the crypt chapel has stained glass from
St. Vibianas -- and her relics. Plus corridors lined with future burial
vaults for the very wealthy -- or the occasional venerable.
Upstairs theres lots of shrine and art space waiting to
happen.
In approaching cathedral and church design, Vosko uses a mantra
from St. John Chrysostom: Its not the building that makes the
people holy, the people who come into the church make the building holy.
Vosko hopes to add inspiration to what he calls the time-honored
ingredients of architecture -- good scale, proper proportions, sense of
verticality, appropriate use of materials and colors and light.
The basketball-playing 6-foot-2-inch-tall priest begins by writing
a cathedrals story, a narrative explaining the why of it (essential in
Los Angeles case because architect Moneo penned little). To sense out
what would be welcoming in the cathedrals doors and tapestries, Vosko
early asked to meet with a multicultural commission.
The result: a kava bowl (Samoa), turtle (Chinese), legs
(Sicilian), the I Ching symbol and dozens more culturally symbolic condors,
fish, stags and lions are cast in the bronze doors. Another result:
10-foot-tall saints from all over the world depicted in the 36 seven-foot-long
20-foot high communion of saints tapestries. Included among 133
saints in the John Nava-designed tapestries being woven in Bruges, Belgium, are
a half-dozen anonymous faces for the unrecognized everyday saints.
The Los Angeles cathedrals design is rather
pure, said Vosko, during a guided tour. I think people are going to
cry out for something light and colorful, and toward which they can establish
their devotions. Initially, until some side shrines are developed, one
focus may be the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, containing the tabernacle, with its
artifacts from St. Vibianas.
Stars in the pavement
Outside, hes pleased with the constellation of the stars --
as theyll be seen the night before the dedication -- embedded in the
pavement near the Samaritan womans well, and inside with the baptismal
pool design.
Four pipes currently stick up like water moccasins in the as-yet
untiled total immersion font. Future candidates will enter through one gate,
descend into the water, be baptized, and leave through another gate (then off
to a small, secluded elevator down to the restrooms to change into dry
clothing).
At the altar, 300 feet east, the ramp-accessible ambo, with a
mechanical lectern, will allow people of any height -- or in a wheelchair -- to
easily do the readings. A building of these dimensions is a challenge for the
acoustical engineers. The swarm of busy, low-hanging lights contains the
speakers. But a new cathedral is like a newly designed aircraft -- no one
really knows how it will work until take-off. The acousticians have already
installed a baffle at the churchs rear to help with a sound hot
spot.
To counteract Southern Californias summertime baking sun,
the plan calls for floor-level radiant cooling. People are going to have
to wear socks to church, said Vosko with a laugh.
Everything about the cathedral is muted. Navas woven
hangings are in the softest of earth tones. Despite its size, the cathedral is
in several ways understated. Though it dominates its site, the complex also
keeps to itself. People have to enter into the plaza -- it doesnt obtrude
upon the city as an open public space. Not even the northwestern corners
180-foot campanile with cross dominates the city landscape.
European Moneo decided to stretch Americans legs --
Angelenos are not pedestrians, they drive everywhere. From the underground
parking to the front pews or transept seats is a hike of more than three
football-field lengths. Its a football field from the front door down the
corridor to the church rear, turn the corner and theres another football
field hike to the front pews. Once inside the church, theres a possible
shortcut between a couple of shrine spaces.
Like incense drifting away
The point of the long walk, however, indeed the whole point of the
cathedral, is the effect on turning that corner.
Once around that corner the huge church turns into a house of
prayer, a large expanse of quiet calm. The very unbusyness of it is immediate
refuge from the blaring cacophony of city and tangled highways, from the
pressures of time, worries, work, woes. The cathedrals slightly softened
stark simplicity soothes, from the alabaster-filtered light -- which gives off
the illusion of incense drifting away -- to the woods of the ceiling and
plainness of the walls, these turn what could have been a 2,400-seat religious
amphitheater into a chapel of ease.
Quite a feat.
In time, beyond the main worship area, several architectural
oddities and missteps will become minor. Theyll be smoothed, enhanced --
the Vosko touch -- in the years ahead. He has his placemats for
future art and projects already mapped out.
Meanwhile, whether people agree or not that a cathedral is money
well spent, the money has been committed, the building is up.
Los Angeles has a cathedral worthy of the name. And Our Lady of
the Angels has a shrine worthy of her calling.
Arthur Jones is NCR editor at large.
National Catholic Reporter, April 19,
2002
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