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It is hard to make a landmark in Los Angeles. The city is relentlessly horizontal, and while you might think that a skyscraper would be memorable, it doesn't work that way in LA. Big, boxy build­ings stay in your line of vision longer, which is something that Rafael Moneo must have kept in mind when he was designing the new Our Lady of the Angels cathedral. It is one of the largest religious buildings constructed in the center of an American city in half a century, and one of the most ambitious. The cathedral will inevitably be compared with Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is to be finished next year. They are both eye-grabbing structures designed by famous architects and they are just a couple of blocks away from each other in downtown Los Angeles. But the new cathedral has more in common with the familiar Los Angeles megabox. It's a big, horizontal mass, like the Beverly Center, the vast shopping mall built atop a parking structure; and the Pacific Design Center, a beached whale in blue glass; and the factorylike Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I don't say this to be disrespectful. I think Moneo has tried to take a particular kind of Los Angeles building and make it into some­thing spiritual, although it's not a natural leap. Gehry's swooping forms are more conventionally cathedral-like. If you asked a visitor which of the new buildings was the cathedral and which was the concert hall, he would probably get it wrong.

Moneo, a sixty-five-year-old architect who is based in Madrid but has spent much of his career in the United States, is a designer of exceptional thought­fulness and precision. Even though he almost always works in masonry, his buildings have a certain delicacy. He isn't known for dazzling new forms, but he doesn't copy the past, either. He is a mod­ernist who strives for timelessness, and he is most comfortable working within the vocabulary that he learned when he came of age in the nineteen-sixties and seven­ties: crisp, hard-edged, geometric. What distinguishes Moneo is his continual push to make this kind of architecture easier on the eye, and on the psyche. His work resembles, in a way, the style called brutalism, but in Moneo's hands it isn't harsh and cold: It's gentle brutalism.

The cathedral is a three-hundred-and-thirty-three-foot-long, ninety-five-foot­high origami of warm, adobe-colored concrete, which is right for a place whose first churches were Spanish missions. The shape recalls one of those performing­arts centers that were built on college campuses in the nineteen-sixties, or a suburban church, blown up to monumental scale and produced on an exquisitely refined level.

Is that enough for a cathedral? The concrete is quite beautiful, although it may have been a mistake to set concrete panels on some sections of the building in such a way that they look like gargantuan pieces of aluminum siding. And the subordinate structures, including the cardinal's residence and the parish of­fices, are clad in stucco and look like or­dinary commercial buildings in the San Fernando Valley. If anything about the exterior stirs the emotions, it is a two­and-a-half-acre plaza, which manages to be a true public place. The plaza has a gift shop, a cafe with white market umbrellas and colorful Philippe Starck plastic chairs, and an escalator that goes down to the cathedral's pricey underground parking garage.  At the far end of the plaza, a wall with glass panels overlooks the plaza, a wall with glass panels overlooks the Hollywood Freeway, a quirky gesture that is rather endearing.  Moneo likes to compare the freeway to a river, and, with the glass wall, he figured out a way to muffle its roar.

The plaza was filled with people when I was there, many of Hispanic descent (the city's eastern neighborhoods, near downtown, are heavily Hispanic), and they were doing the kinds of urban things people so rarely do in Los Angeles - like walking around. When the Getty Center, with its immense travertine piazza, opened a few years ago in Brentwood, the haute bourgeoisie of Los Angeles got a chance to be urban pedestrians, and the cathedral is giving others the same opportunity It's the poor man's Getty, which is not an insignificant achievement.

The architecture gets better inside the cathedral. Moneo plays with the past and is genuinely inventive at the same time. His best touch is both an homage to the traditional Gothic cathedral and a subtle, brilliant inversion of it. He has laid out the cathedral in a fairly standard way - there is a cruciform-shaped nave in the center, flanked by long, enclosed ambulatories containing several small chapels. But he placed the facade at the same end of the building as the altar, which makes for an unusual entry sequence. You don't enter the building directly into the nave, as in a traditional cathedral. A pair of somewhat pompous bronze doors designed by the sculptor Robert Graham on the left side of the facade bring you into the south ambulatory, which is a long, sloping corridor that narrows slightly as you move forward, like diminishing perspective. The ambulatory is not an open arcade, as in a Gothic cathedral, and it is largely cut off from the nave by walls. As you walk along, you occasionally glimpse the nave to your right, and, while it is possible to turn and enter the larger space, you are encouraged to keep walking to the end, at which point you turn right and enter the nave from the far end of the cathedral, facing the altar - the spot in a conventional cathedral that you would have entered in the first place.

This is great processional architecture. The dramatic experience of moving through the building has been enhanced and extended, and when you finally enter the nave it is almost worth the buildup. Moneo has made a sumptuous modern space, angled and asymmetrical but calming. It is the same adobe color as the exterior, and there is soft, even light from huge alabaster windows. Crisply modern rooms with no right angles are rarely this serene. It is the light, which appears almost to waft over the concrete, that does it. Moneo rejected stained glass as too traditional, and the Archdio­cese of Los Angeles rejected it as too expensive. An astonishing twenty-seven thousand square feet of Spanish alabaster was used, but, except for certain areas in which it provides a dramatic accent  (as a backdrop for a huge concrete crucifix over the altar, for instance), it is invisible. There are some wrong moves: fussy hanging chandeliers that look a little too much like the glowing-globe fixtures that were popular in modern buildings in the nineteen-sixties, and a lot of earnest, dreary representational art. Moneo had hoped to commission pieces from distinguished abstractionists like Agnes Martin and Martin Puryear, but Cardinal Roger Mahony said he wanted art that his parishioners would easily understand.

I wonder if the Cardinal didn't sell his flock short. Still, you have to take Mahony seriously as a great patron. His predecessors had been trying to build a new cathedral for nearly a century, and he got the job done in less than eight years.  The genesis of the project was the Northridge earthquake in 1994, which caused structural damage to the old cathedral, St. Vibiana's, a far too small Spanish­style church near a Latino shopping district deeper in the heart of downtown.  The Cardinal wanted to build on the site of St. Vibiana's, but when preservationists took the archdiocese to court, he wasted no time acquiring the much bigger site, and then sold the old church to a developer, who is converting it into a performing-arts center. The new cathedral project cost something close to two hundred million dollars, most of which came from private sources, although that didn't stop a local alternative newspaper from calling it the Taj Mahony

I didn't sense that the parishioners saw it that way Indeed, they seemed to have a certain pride of ownership, which is remarkable, considering how different the cathedral is from what they are accustomed to. Moneo manages to stir up a substantial degree of emotion in a giant space, which isn't easy to do. Most big things built today are secular - convention centers, sports arenas, and the like. Few really large religious buildings have been constructed in this country in the last few years, and most of them have been fundamentalist churches in the South and the Midwest that, however meaningful they may be to their congregations, seem to me spiritually akin to shopping malls. Moneo says that the modern religious buildings he likes are small -Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp in eastern France, the even smaller Matisse chapel on the Cote d'Azur. In Los Angeles, he has made a valiant effort to render sacred space on a large scale, and he has done it without tricks or gimmicks.

By Pual Goldberger

This Article Appeared in the September 23, 2002 issue of The New Yorker

Copyright 2002 The New Yorker