Design: To the Lighthouse

What should a church look like today? One bold answer: Rafael Moneo's L.A. cathedral

Church design may be the only kind of architecture that you learn about in the nursery. "Here's the church, here's the steeple..." Well, here is the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the immense new Roman Catholic church for the city of Los Angeles. So where's the steeple? And where is the central doorway you expect from a great sacred space? And what happened to the stained-glass windows and the crowds of ecclesiastical statuary that a Catholic church has always brought to mind? There have been many modern churches before this one. Even so, the L.A. cathedral, the first to...

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