To the Lighthouse

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Over the past century, the clean lines of modern architecture have been making their way fitfully into churches. In a way they have been lending their validity to religion, at least in the eyes of secularized society. Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn all designed great and very spare modern churches. The sole foray into church design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the great founding master of modernism, was a nondenominational chapel in brick, steel and glass built in 1952 on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. To put it mildly, it's a parsimonious expression of faith. The man who said, "God is in the details," did not provide many here for God to be in. From the outside it looks something like an unemployment office, which may not be the image God wants to go for.

All the same, the unadorned spaces that the modernists love never represented much of a threat to Protestantism. One of the aims of the Reformation, after all, was to purify churches, to clear out the bric-a-brac of Catholic worship. For that same reason, Catholic churches have been more resistant. "Stations of the Cross, stained glass, carved saints — many people find that kind of symbolism is an entry to a worshipful state," says architecture historian Judith Dupre, the author of Churches (Harper Collins). Dupre prefers the simplified forms of modernism, but she also recognizes that churches are a place of memory. "Not just memories from your own life — baptisms, marriages, deaths — but from the historical past. At church you are joining a communion of saints. And for many people that feeling is best expressed in traditional iconography."

It says something about the triumph of modern church design that Richard Meier, an uncompromising inheritor of the spirit of Mies, was chosen by the archdiocese of Rome to design the Church of the Year 2000 that is under construction there. Meier makes no apologies for the fact that his church is an unequivocally modern object of elegant but mostly unembellished glass and steel. "This is a contemporary church," he says, "a church that has to capture the spirit of the present times."

But if elite taste long ago turned away from conventional church design, it has also turned away from classic glass-box modernism. One of the most widely studied churches of the past few years has been Steven Holl's Chapel of St. Ignatius, on the campus of Seattle University, a Jesuit school. Holl based his design on the teachings of the Jesuits' founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, who held that one could reach God's grace through the experience of the senses. Accordingly, Holl made his church a journey through different passages of light — colored, clear, subdued, direct — that correspond to the soul's journey toward God — a notion that Moneo's cathedral also reflects. Light is the metaphysical ornament that modernists all agree upon.

Moneo knew that his assignment in Los Angeles was to provide a space not just for celebrating Mass but also for mass celebration, a place where thousands of people — the pews seat 2,600; the plaza outside can accommodate more than 5,000--can come together in communion. But as his high walls and long corridors show, his additional aim was to provide that community with a sense of monastic enclosure.

In L.A. the most common experience of isolation is the one you have behind the wheel of your car. Moneo has compared the Hollywood Freeway, which the church presses right up against, with the Seine, which courses past Notre Dame in Paris. But he has also done his utmost to put you at a remove from this particular flow. As the world rushes by in its Hondas and suvs, you watch it only through long windows cut into one wall, a literal frame of mind that encourages some critical distance from the folly of worldly hubbub. What should a church look like in the 21st century? What Moneo is saying is that maybe it's a place where the eyes, in the end, are turned inward.