The following comes from a November 17 LA Times article by Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic:
I arrived for a news briefing a few weeks ago inside the stripped-down, renamed Christ Cathedral to find diocese media officials handing out virtual-reality headsets. What we all saw when we strapped those headsets on was a digitized version of the remade cathedral interior that is heavy, earthbound and handsome to a fault. It is a design more suggestive of the offices of a high-end law firm than the kinds of early experiments in postmodernism.
The pulpit will be replaced by an altar. The new pews, in dark walnut, will be aligned in a radial pattern. The fountain that ran through the center of the cathedral, splashing audibly until it died down just as the reverend began to speak, is already gone. New interior walls, 14 feet high, will be wrapped in fluted limestone. Other details will be in brushed stainless steel, dark bronzed steel, marble and cherry wood.
The biggest change is the proposed addition of a new fixed layer of translucent panels, each in the shape of a quatrefoil, hanging from the cathedral’s existing space-frame of white-painted steel tubes. The system is an effort to bring additional shade to a piece of architecture that was already kept from being excessively bright by the reflective mirrored-glass panels on the exterior.
What the original architect Phillip Johnson created inside the cathedral, was “a hushed, underwater atmosphere.” Going from that treatment of light to an imitation of a dark European cathedral is an impossible journey. The whole point of the building is to be a container for sunlight — muted sunlight, but sunlight nonetheless.
It’s worth remembering that the original version, soon to be covered up, is one of the great ceilings in postwar American architecture, the seemingly endless Jeffersonian grid lifted off the map and into the air and made luminous by the California sun. It was the kind of ceiling a structural engineer and a seeker of God could admire in equal measure. It was aerospace, Walt Disney, a revival tent and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London spun into one.
It’s clear that a central goal of the redesign is to bring some gravitas to the sanctuary — a sense of weight underscored by expensive and muscular materials. It’s hardly shocking that the Diocese of Orange would ask the architects to try to move in that direction. It’s also possible that the church never looked particularly deeply into the unorthodox architectural history of the cathedral when it decided to buy the compound, never truly understood what it meant as a cultural as well as religious landmark.
The reasons for the purchase, after all, would seem to have had mostly to do with demographics. Orange County represents a growth opportunity for the Catholic Church, especially among Latino and Asian parishioners, at a time of declining membership around the country; the Diocese of Orange, with 1.2 million members, is the 10th largest in the country and the second-biggest west of the Mississippi.
But it is surprising that any architect could support the idea that gravitas and the Crystal Cathedral are even the slightest bit compatible. The building has far more in common with the nearby Matterhorn at Disneyland, the Biosphere in Arizona or the domes of Buckminster Fuller than with any cathedral in Europe.
The Diocese of Orange made a huge and costly mistake by purchasing the Crystal Cathedral and its campus, but the diocese will never admit that publicly in so many words. For about the same amount of money it cost to purchase and renovate the cathedral and its campus, the diocese could have purchased land and built an authentically Catholic brand-new cathedral. Too bad the Catholic faithful in the diocese will be suffering with the ugly consequences of the diocese’s rashness for at least two centuries.
Exactly right Sawyer, and hey “FrMichael”, I’m not a “discontented traditionalist”, just a faithful Catholic who appreciates authentically Catholic churches!
Kristin, my point is your point. Up until now critics of the purchase have been criticized as “traditionalists” or architectural know-nothings. Now that a professional architectural critic has weighed in, a person who can’t be so easily dismissed by the liturgical wreckovation mafia, it will be interesting to see if they even deign to respond to the article. My guess is that the diocese will pretend the article doesn’t even exist.
FrMichael, really, “the liturgical wreckovation mafia”? OK, so you have shown your hand. We will just have to agree to disagree, and hope this former Protestant mecca of overdone glitz can somehow become a Catholic Cathedral, in the best sense of the phrase. I have my doubts but am willing to see the results, such as they are, after work has been completed.
Dear Kristin:
I think you continue to misunderstand me. The “liturgical wreckovation mafia” are a group of people calling themselves liturgical design consultants (LDC), including the religious brother who is overseeing the work at this cathedral-to-be. To my knowledge none of them are professional architects, and yet thousands of churches across the US have been renovated (or “wreckovated”), some with ghastly results, by their designs. I can think of a number of churches in my area that were internally turned 90 degrees, leaving the church lopsided. (more to follow)
(continued) I delight that this LA Times architecture writer has called out in public what many of us decried at CCD and other venues when the sale of the Crystal Cathedral was announced: that it would be very difficult to convert the CC into a Catholic cathedral. The Diocese of Orange was so entranced by getting the property at a huge discount that they overlooked this problem.
Wow, that’s a brutal review! Can’t chalk that article up to discontented traditionalists as the AmChurch apparatchiks are wont to do.
No, you certainly can’t, Father. But the truth is the truth. Whether it come from the mouth of babes or Balaam’s famous talking pack animal ;^)
Hahaha. Never, ever should the hubris-drenched bishops of Orange spent one dime on this Protestant monstrosity. It can never, ever become a Catholic Church. All of the described “gravitas’ does not mean much without a central tabernacle, a real and true baptismal font (not a swimming pool), pews with kneelers, statutes of Mary, Joseph and key Saints, all of that (and much more). Now you will have a “Catholic Matterhorn” instead of a traditional cathedral.
But then, what do you expect from a Church that is disgusted with its own DNA. Whose leaders have nothing much to do with Tradition, or in faithfully transmitting the Deposit of Faith. Enjoy Francis-Land.
What is an authentic Catholic church building. After visiting hundreds and hundreds around the country, in Asia, and in Europe I’m less able to describe authentic than some on this site. Please enlighten us!
Sure you have “Bob One.” Even so, decades of wreckovation has eliminated the “Catholic Look” from so many churches that exist today, especially in Europe and urban USA. But, you know this, don’t you, and Francis knows it too, as he attempts to create some kind of unified nutter theory of the NewChurch.
What was it that Isaias said: “Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.” (Isaias 5:20)
(Part Deux) “. . . Go ahead and find a mass in a bus station, or a concrete pill box. I can give you a pretty good list of places to go, places with no kneelers, where they demand that you hold hands during the Our Father, where they pray with their hands fluttering around like some kind of Pilates class, and where saying a “Hail Mary” or the Prayer to St. Michael” is seen as an oddity.
Find your own place. Soon Traditional orders will turn out far more priests than the N.O. seminaries. And they will be saying Mass in a place that anyone will know is Catholic.
St. C, there you go again. Here is what makes a Catholic church: the presence of Christ on the altar. The altar is supposed to be the central architectural focus of whatever building design we use. Even the most “modern” church buildings have the stations of the cross around the outside walls, have a repository for the tabernacle, have a cross with corpus, an Ambo for the liturgy of the Word and the preaching of the Gospel. That is all it needs. Doesn’t need seats or pews, kneelers, etc. It needs an altar. Now, is all the other adornment a plus? Of course. Also keep in mind that architectural styles change over the centuries.
So if it has to be a European Cathedral, does that suggest the institution is a European Church? My understanding is that the growth in the Church is elsewhere. Perhaps local tastes influence the design of the building where the Bishop puts his chair?
The Crystal Cathedral is in-your-face-testimony to the pagan instincts of the modern Catholic church bishops.
So we don’t recall that God always turns something ugly/mean/bad into something beautiful/kind/good for His glory.
He has brought His church to us still growing from Tradition. We His children need to be faithful and pray for all
those that want to be neo Christians. Hep (you know). Let’s praise Him and thank Him we live in America and are
able to criticize our own.
Folks,
Don’t worry, an “Act of God” {earthquake} will settle the matter. {Mark 13:2}
David Sheehan
Fort Worth, Texas
I am just floored by the judgments and remarks here-, ,some have never seen it, nor visited it. I wish I had all the time and energy these people have, to heap criticism and judgment on something they don’t particularly l like. Am sure they are waiting God’s affirmation of their brilliant remarks. Dream on….We have been to Mass in other cities and some churches are gorgeous and others leave a lot to be desired. But Christ is on every altar and His Body and Blood are there for us. It is our prayers and participation that matter, and the graces flowing from the Sacraments and prayers that count. And priests who are authentically passing on the Faith, and are reverent. I pray we never have to go underground to attend Mass, and…
OK, so maybe you don’t like the building, the architect, or the fact that the Catholic Church has purchased the church. However, for those of you who diss it because of its Protestant origin, please remember this: the Pantheon in Rome, once a pagan temple, was given to a Pope in the early 600s, and became known as Santa Maria Rotonda, a church dedicated to St Mary and the Martyrs. It is still a Catholic Church today. To convert a pagan temple into a Christian church or to build a church on the site of a pagan temple was common practice back in the day.
I say Ginny Lopez is the only one who has made the most sensible comment on this thread.
Ginny is quite wrong, as is jon, in apparently observing that pagan structures may become inherently Catholic (ex. the “Pantheon”). The Pantheon could be accommodated to a Catholic structure (it was consecrated in 609AD), as for one thing it resembled the Greek-cross style (cf. Hagia Sophia, ca. 537AD).
However, inherently pagan structures that lack central focus on Christ, the altar, e.g., unity of focus, and bilateral symmetry—ex. the Roman amphitheatre, the Roman circus, or the Aztec pyramid of sacrifice, are not coherent designs, for example, for a Catholic Church.
The jury is out on the Crystal “Cathedral”.
Also, some “temples” could never be accomodated either, the Pantheon being one exception (yes, there are others): but the Temple of Minerva in Rome was one that was destroyed, and the Dominican “Santa Maria Sopra Minerva” erected on its site.
European Catholic cathedrals were designed and built over centuries, by deeply religious people, according to very specific, sacred church designs! A Catholic used to be taught, that he or she is now entering the holy realm of God, when entering a church, or cathedral– with Christ at the center of the High Altar, in the Blessed Sacrament! Modern people have lost their sense of the sacred, and of God! That is the problem!