ARCHITECTURE : Dull, Shed-Like Exterior Houses a Majestic, Light-Filled Church

Our best buildings used to be churches. The repository of the faith of a community, they made a divine presence evident in the physical world. These days, churches are often as banal as your average shopping center.

But St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Pacific Palisades is a notable exception. Hiding its massive shape behind a ring of sloping roofs, it rises up to contain a majestic, light-filled space that cannot but fill you with awe.

The designer of the church, Charles Moore, gives much of the credit for the particulars of the building to the congregation. A pioneer in participatory design, Moore and his firm, Moore Ruble Yudell, worked for many months with the parishioners to come up both with a layout that would satisfy everybody and with an image that the church members thought would be fitting.

In the end, the church design takes its place as one of the most fully realized reflections of the design methods of Moore, a former Yale and UCLA dean who this year won the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal.

Rather than using imposed orders and borrowed images, Moore favors building up forms through partial geometrics that always imply something larger, screens that define and shelter activities without separating them, and light that seems to seep in everywhere.

So it is with St. Matthew’s. The main space is a giant shed that at first glance seems to have no order. Yet two giant trusses define a traditional cross axis that culminates over the altar in a webbed truss. The sides of the space are formed by sloped sections, whose geometries motion to the center.

A side chapel nestles in without separating itself from the main space. Light filters in from skylights and large windows that look out at a prayer garden, along the way revealing the intricacies of the structure and the nature of the wood, plaster, steel and Mexican tile that form the palette of the church.

Following medieval precedent, Moore has turned the church into an exhibition of structure and materials that are sometimes undercut or purposefully confused, as in the two large steel screens that support the trusses and are filled in with laminated wood bolted to the inside of the arched forms.

Studying all of these unfinished forms and gentle gesture, you are left to wonder about the unseen order of the universe while you are gathered before the altar.

The exterior of the church is somewhat less successful. It looms over its site with its shed roof and tall, brown-gray stucco walls. It is as if the church has nothing to say publicly, reserving all of its intricacy for the enjoyment of the rather privileged congregation. The outside also shares the inside’s confusion over its identity: Is it a slightly Gothic parish church, or a Spanish-style mission? Inside, wood battens ending in Gothic arches imply the former in a rather cartoon-like manner, although the rambling courtyards and pergolas that mask the outside imply the latter.

What this building says about itself in decoration and image is rather vague and a little silly, ranging from an abstracted “tree of life” over the altar to a detached bell tower standing watch over the parking lot. But through form, light, structure and texture it gives us faith that architecture can indeed still create places of wonder.