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Beautiful? Sure, if you like Albert Speer's plans for Germania, or Mussolini's EUR. The Galveston-Houston Co-Cathedral is the work of hack designers and all the fancy religious sculpture and windows and mosaic work is by hack artists from Italy. That building is utterly vulgar compared to the new Los Angeles cathedral.

Talk about out-sourcing! Other cathedral projects in the Americas have fostered home grown workshops to teach artisanal skills like stone carving and stained glass window making, but instead of fostering new careers and local artistic visions, the Church has just bought tons of saccharine kitsch and slathered on a big fake stone barn.

When I see the awful decoration and sculpture in that church the closest thing it brings to mind is that ridiculous monastery that Spanish dictator Franco built to assuage his guilt.

I couldn't agree with Mr Bodenheimer more.
Rice Design Alliance has an article in its quarterly publication, CITE, this month written by a professor of architecture from U Mass-Amherst and he addresses the questions of whom the cathedral is built for (obviously the converted, and the converted with questionable taste) and the fact that a golden opportunity was lost in a city with some decent architecture elsewhere.
Some of the church here think LA's masterpiece is "pagan," but their tapestry of saints is phenomenal, the presence of private spaces, the crypts, the hidden entrance, the slope, the outstanding organ all attest to a much higher level of ecclesiastical artistic function in Los Angeles. We are stuck with this bomb.