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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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 L.A. 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...
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