Building a Bridge to the Heavens

When visitors enter St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco, their eyes quickly swoop up and jaws slacken in astonishment. Twenty stories high, the interior is an eight-sided cone of concrete with a stained-glass cross that pierces the heavens. It is unlike any church they have ever seen.

Many worshipers have found divine inspiration within its walls since the Roman Catholic cathedral was dedicated 25 years ago. But others have complained loudly that they can’t find God in such a radically modern space.

“To an ordinary layman, it was a tremendous change. They were stunned,” said Mary Hehir, St. Mary’s docent director, recalling early reaction. “But the more you see it and know it, the more it takes on a tremendous spirituality.”

Roman Catholic leaders in Los Angeles are planning their own new cathedral, replacing quake-damaged St. Vibiana’s with a larger church they hope will stand as a symbol of faith for the nation’s most-populous archdiocese and as an emblem for the secular city. As the St. Mary’s experience has showed them, the rare task of modern cathedral-building raises profound religious, financial, social and urban issues. The most difficult question may be what the church should look like, as its designer seeks to bridge Catholic history and the new millennium.

Can an architect create a grand and sacred house of worship for Southern California’s fractured and consumerist society? Should it be located on a gritty block of downtown Los Angeles or in a more suburban setting? How should it incorporate modern liturgy and reflect the archdiocese’s large Latino population? Might the estimated $45 million in construction costs better aid the poor? And how much, if any, of the existing St. Vibiana’s at 2nd and Main streets should be preserved?

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony is grappling with those tough questions. Much depends on the architect he is expected to select this weekend from among five of the biggest design names in the United States and Western Europe.

The winner, to be announced soon afterward, must translate Mahony’s very general ideas into a cathedral that generations of Angelenos can embrace.

“There are so many facets and definitions of what a cathedral is that everyone feels they have an investment in it,” said Robert E. Rambusch, a national authority on church design. Adding a warning about St. Vibiana’s, he said: “If you think there is discussion and criticism up till now, wait until the design comes out.”

‘This Is Mt. Everest’

Mahony and the private donors of the $45 million say they want a 2,500- to 3,000-seat cathedral that honors the Hispanic style of California while advancing design into the future. The cardinal hopes that the building will “unlock for everyone the potential of a glimpse of God’s glory and his nearness to us.” And, if stalled real estate talks finally succeed, he wants the church to improve the troubled downtown neighborhood whose cardboard-box encampments seem a long way from glory.

Meeting those challenges, everyone agrees, may require divine inspiration--even given the stellar field of contenders. Three--Frank O. Gehry of Santa Monica, Robert Venturi of Philadelphia and Jose Rafael Moneo of Spain--have received the annual Pritzker Prize, considered the Nobel of architecture. The others are garnering increasing acclaim--Thom Mayne of the Santa Monica firm Morphosis and Santiago Calatrava, a Spaniard who works in Switzerland.

A winner is expected to be chosen based in part on his design of a shrine for a religious statue. The cathedral commission may be worth about $3 million to the architect’s firm.

Gehry likened designing the new St. Vibiana’s to climbing the highest summit: “This is Mt. Everest. The confrontation with yourself and who you are and your talents and what you can produce and give to it are right on the edge of impossible.”

St. Vibiana’s presents special demands, agreed Michael Hricak, president of the American Institute of Architects’ Los Angeles chapter. “Not only is it a new cathedral, it is a new cathedral in a city that is supposed to embody the 21st century on the Pacific Rim,” he said. “It’s an important and tough assignment.”

Master builders of the past also faced great challenges in erecting a cathedra--the Latin word for a bishop’s seat. Amid wars, religious schisms, poverty and disastrous structural collapses, the creation of Gothic cathedrals such as Notre Dame and those at Chartres and Cologne was something of a miracle.

The churches’ overpowering size and beauty led medieval worshipers to believe they had entered “the gateway to heaven,” said Mervyn Blatch in his 1980 book, “Cathedrals.” The buildings were giant audiovisual aids, teaching Bible lessons to the illiterate through carvings and stained-glass windows. Some of the monumental structures, including the later St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and St. Paul’s in London, also came to symbolize their cities’ power.

“There are transcendental aspects of the works that give you goose bumps--the sound and the light and the quality of the space and atmosphere,” said Mayne.

The Gothic model maintains its hold. The Washington National Cathedral was completed in 1990 after 83 years of work that involved centuries-old stone-cutting techniques to create gargoyles and high vaults. Another Episcopal institution that was built with those methods--the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City--is in use but still isn’t finished after 94 years.

Mahony does not want a Gothic-style cathedral, partly because they take so long to build. He hopes to have a usable structure in the year 2000, although full decoration may take many more years.

Instead he favors a Hispanic flavor. But other than requesting a tall mission-style bell tower and a large plaza, he offers no specifics. “It’s very hard to say. We would like to be in that magnificent tradition,” he said in a recent interview, “but with an expression of it that is new and looking forward for three or four hundred years.”

He and the five architects say they do not want what the cardinal called “a copycat church.”

A California mission has “a solidity to it,” said Gehry. “It feels gutsy inside because of the thickness of the adobe walls. And that’s the hardest thing to do. How do you get that solidity with modern construction? . . . How to do it without copying it, without trivializing it, without making a joke or a caricature. That’s the game. And it’s a hard game.”

Beyond that, the designers wonder how to stir the emotions and spirit of fast-paced, secularized people who may pause for contemplation only while stuck in traffic.

“Generally, I think today it is a tremendous challenge to produce a work that would be intrinsically spiritual,” Mayne said. “I think it is so outside our framework of our hyper-capitalist, rationalized day-to-day life.”

The favored location, in a part of downtown that many people avoid, raises the stakes, architect Moneo said in a phone interview from Spain: “Believe me, whoever gets the job is going to have quite a hard job--the difficulty of expressing those religious feelings and dealing with a difficult urban context,” he said.

Archdiocese officials report problems in negotiating the purchase of land next to the current cathedral. As a result of that and fears of possible preservation disputes, they are exploring unspecified sites outside downtown, although they hope to stay on the historic property.

Most important to Mahony is the interior worship space. Ritual changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s encourage new church shapes and a switch from altars that were far from worshipers, or even behind gates. Today, priests face the congregation from altars closer to the people. Some churches are built in the round.

Those changes, along with the need for garages and television facilities, make it harder to produce feelings of awe, said Father Lawrence Madden, a Jesuit who is director of the Georgetown University Center for Liturgy, Spirituality and the Arts. So, he complained, many modern churches are bland.

“Some are just so soft and sloppy, like a Hilton lobby,” Madden said. “I think they fail in lifting people up and giving them a sense of the sacred.”

The critics cited some exceptions, including the Crystal Cathedral, headquarters for the Rev. Robert H. Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church. Designed by the legendary Philip Johnson and opened in 1980, it is wrapped in a glass frame 12 stories high. “It brings us to a sense of wonder,” said Edward Sovik, a church architecture expert.

Designers Screened

The original St. Mary’s of San Francisco, built in 1853 and now called Old St. Mary’s, is still used as a downtown parish. A larger successor lasted 71 years until destroyed by a 1962 fire. Catholic leaders hired little-known local architects to design a new cathedral on a hilltop in the slum clearance zone of the neighborhood known as the Western Addition.

Early proposals were bashed. Allan Temko, architecture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote that the architects were known for “glum, bureaucratic structures” while the church and city deserved “greatness.” Embarrassed, the archdiocese hired as consultants Pietro Belluschi, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s dean of architecture and architect of many churches, and the noted Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi.

Belluschi “didn’t look back,” said Julie Benbow, St. Mary’s director of development. “He said that it had to reflect in mid-20th century terms what the Gothic cathedrals did in the 14th and 15th centuries.” And, he reveled in the Vatican II changes.

The church is formed with soaring shapes called hyperbolic paraboloids that produce an aerial view of a cross. The altar is surrounded on three sides by pews; a sculptured canopy of aluminum rods hangs over it. Side shrines have beautiful bronze sculptures, but no traditional statues or candles.

Some San Franciscans embraced the modernity and others were outraged. For detractors, St. Mary’s remains “the Bishop’s Bendix,” a nasty reference to the exterior they compare to a washing machine agitator. Mahony considers St. Mary’s “exciting,” but said worshipers’ eyes are drawn too much to the coned ceiling and away from the altar.

Mindful of the early criticism of the architect selection in San Francisco, Mahony hired developer Ira Yellin to gather a jury of architects and artists to screen potential designers. However, some observers wonder whether the five contenders are too avant-garde for the project’s big donors: the Dan Murphy Foundation, which gave $25 million, and the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation, which gave $10 million. The foundations’ leaders will consult with the cardinal, who will make the final choice.

Daniel J. Donohue, president of the Dan Murphy Foundation and son-in-law of its namesake, described himself as a traditionalist fond of California Hispanic architecture. “I would have certain reservations about some of this modern architecture. I find it very cold and shallow,” he said.

But he added that he finds St. Mary’s interior “very beautiful and functional,” although “the outside doesn’t do much for me.”

Another juror suggested that it may be difficult to satisfy all the different tastes. “They want something that shows the future and at the same time doesn’t take off and fly away,” he said.

Morality Debates

Since the Middle Ages, cathedral building has set off morality debates about spending. In San Francisco, some Catholics suggested that the $9 million it cost to build St. Mary’s should have gone to helping the poor. A similar debate surrounded a new cathedral in Managua, Nicaragua, two years ago as that country recovered from civil war. Partly to avoid such arguments, American Roman Catholics and Episcopalians in the past 30 years usually have designated an existing parish church as their bishop’s seat or have renovated an old cathedral.

The Los Angeles archdiocese pledges not to take money for St. Vibiana’s from local parishes or other areas of need.

The Los Angeles Catholic Worker community, which runs a soup kitchen on skid row, said the $45 million should go to social concerns first. “I believe it is scandalous to build a new cathedral in the midst of the most impoverished area of downtown Los Angeles,” said Jeff Dietrich, a Catholic Worker member.

Monsignor Terry Fleming, rector of St. Vibiana’s and archdiocese vice chancellor, said such comments ignore the archdiocese’s extensive good works at schools, hospitals and charities: “We educate people. We help the poor. We take care of all needs of society. We have a need, too, for a new cathedral.”

Donohue of the Dan Murphy Foundation, which donates many millions to charity, said he respects the Catholic Worker group. Yet he stressed that a new cathedral might inspire more philanthropy. “People may come out of there with their spirits lifted and moved by the grace of God to want to do something worthwhile,” he said.

Another sticky point is what to do with the 120-year-old St. Vibiana’s, which is named after and contains the relics of a 3rd-century martyred maiden from Italy. Since 1904, the archdiocese several times has planned to replace the cathedral--on the current site and elsewhere, but financial troubles and world wars interfered.

The archdiocese triggered a preservationist furor last year when it said the cathedral would be razed and replaced at the same site. Recently, church leaders said they await the architect’s advice on the possibility of including parts or all of the building in a new complex. Engineers for the archdiocese estimate that saving the old church would cost $20.5 million, four times the estimate of the Los Angeles Conservancy. Because St. Vibiana’s is a city landmark, the cardinal fears protracted legal and political fights.

Facing similar seismic repairs, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles sold its 1,200-seat St. Paul’s Cathedral at Figueroa Street and Wilshire Boulevard and the structure was razed in 1980. A new $12-million Cathedral Center of St. Paul opened in 1994 on the site of a former small parish church along Echo Park Lake. Designed by John A. Gougeon of Pasadena, it resembles a Mediterranean village rather than a grand cathedral, and includes a church that can accommodate 300--with more room on a plaza.

The Roman Catholics clearly have something much bigger in mind, grand enough to complement that nearby cathedral of secular power, Los Angeles City Hall.

The new St. Vibiana’s “should be attracting, almost like gravity,” Mahony said. “It should have something there that calls to my inner spirit. . . . What I don’t want is people to walk by and say: ‘Gee, that’s an interesting building. I wonder what that is?’ ”

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The Maser Builders

The five semifinalist architects for a new St. Vibiana’s Cathedral are some of the biggest names in the United States and Western Europe. Three are American--including two from Santa Monica--and two are Spanish.

Santiago Calatrava, 44

Spanish architect-engineer who lives in Zurich. Known for European bridges and a train station in Lyon, France. Designed transept for Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and art museum in Milwaukee, both awaiting construction.

Cathedrals “are for everybody, a house for all the people of the city, and in a universal sense, a house for the whole world.”

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Frank O. Gehry, 67

Santa Monica-based dean of contemporary California architecture. Local designs: Loyola Law School, California Aerospace Museum and unbuilt Disney Concert Hall. American Center in Paris; Guggenheim Museum under construction in Spain.

A cathedral, “if it’s done right, it moves people, evokes all kinds of feelings and emotions, whether you are religious or not.”

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Thom Mayne, 52

Co-founder of Southern California Institute of Architecture. His Santa Monica firm, Morphosis, designed Cedars-Sinai cancer center, Pomona’s Diamond Ranch High School, Science Museum School at Exposition Park.

The cathedral is “a project of heroic proportions, a work which will be understood by future generations as bringing a reconciliation to the City of Angels.”

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Jose Rafael Moneo, 59

Former architecture chairman at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Madrid native; designed National Museum of Roman Art in Merida, Spain; a Wellesley College of art center; soon-to-be-built Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

“Under the urban point of view, it is an act of faith in an area that is so depressed today. It is much more daring to put the cathedral there than in the hills.”

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Robert Venturi, 70

He and wife Denise Scott Brown run Philadelphia firm. Designed Sainsbury Wing of National Gallery in London, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum. As author, led the revolt against sterile modernism in architecture.

“We have to remember architecture is a background . . . You want to be able to pray, hear the sermon, here the music, and not be utterly overcome by the place.”