Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles lost its historic cathedral, Saint Vibiana, to the Northridge earthquake of January 1994, which cracked its walls badly enough that the city condemned the building rather than repair it. Rather than rebuild in the same Baroque Revival style, the archdiocese commissioned the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, already a Pritzker Prize laureate, and what he produced on Temple Street broke deliberately with expectation: a structure built almost entirely from acute and obtuse angles, avoiding right angles throughout, clad in a warm toned concrete rather than stone.

The design drew criticism as well as praise before it opened. Some Angelenos had expected a cathedral in a recognizably Gothic or Spanish colonial idiom, and Moneo's austere modern forms, along with a budget that climbed from an initial one hundred fifty million dollars to nearly one hundred ninety million by completion in 2002, made the building a subject of public argument. The interior answers that austerity with light: rather than stained glass, its windows are cut from thin alabaster panels, admitting a diffuse golden glow across the nave.

The building's name reaches back further than 2002. Los Angeles was founded by Spanish colonists in 1781 under the full title El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles, Our Lady Queen of the Angels, a title the cathedral's own dedication invokes directly.

The cathedral today seats three thousand worshippers, houses a mausoleum with over a thousand crypts, and serves as the seat of an archdiocese of roughly five million Catholics, the largest in the United States, hosting the ordinations, funerals and civic Masses that scale of a diocese requires.

Where the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels' first article describes Rafael Moneo's austere concrete forms and its alabaster windows, its most detailed storytelling happens in textile rather than stone or glass. The Communion of Saints, a cycle of twenty five tapestries designed by the California artist John Nava, lines the nave on both sides, individual panels running as tall as twenty one feet, depicting a procession of one hundred thirty six named saints and beatified figures alongside a dozen unnamed representative worshippers, running the length of the nave above the seated congregation.

Nava worked from photographs of real, contemporary models to build each saint's face and posture before the designs were sent to a workshop in Belgium for weaving using traditional tapestry techniques, a deliberate choice meant to root historical religious figures in recognizably present day human features rather than in idealized medieval iconography. A final panel, a Marian tapestry, completed the cycle years after the cathedral's 2002 dedication, closing a project its own artist described as never fully finished until that last addition was hung.

The building's bronze entrance doors, designed separately by sculptor Robert Graham, carry their own dense iconography, cast at a combined weight of roughly twenty five tons and set beneath a bronze statue above the entrance representing Our Lady of the Angels, her face deliberately blended from Asian, African American and Caucasian features rather than rendered in any single ethnic likeness. Between the doors, the tapestries and the alabaster glow overhead, the cathedral's decoration argues, consistently, for a communion drawn from every background at once rather than from one artistic or cultural tradition.