The Crystal Cathedral Redesign: Why Tasteful Updates Add Up to Architectural Disappointment

The Los Angeles Times ^ | 11/17/16 | Christopher Hawthorne

[marshmallow]

When the Rev. Robert H. Schuller decided in the mid-1970s that his congregation was outgrowing the drive-in, low-slung Garden Grove church that Richard Neutra had designed for him 15 years earlier within earshot of Interstate 5, and that he needed a purpose-built cathedral to accommodate his increasingly popular “Hour of Power” televised sermons, he flew to New York to visit the architecture firm run by Philip Johnson and John Burgee.

On the face of it, Schuller and Johnson were a very strange match, the self-made Orange County televangelist and the smoothly moneyed New York architect who was also an atheist and gay. But at heart they were both salesmen.

Johnson, who always knew how to make headlines, once said, “Whoever commissions buildings, buys me. I am for sale. I am a whore. I am an artist.” Schuller described his Garden Grove compound as “a 22-acre shopping center for Jesus Christ.”

Together, between 1977 and 1980, they produced one of the triumphant landmarks of Southern California kitsch, at 415 feet wide, 207 feet deep and 128 feet high bigger than Notre Dame in Paris. A giant asymmetrical mirrored-glass iceberg of a building, equal parts Bruno Taut’s 1914 Glass Pavilion in Cologne, Germany, and Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, it was immediately dubbed the Crystal Cathedral.

So maybe it was oddly fitting, a kind of historical rhyme, when in the wake of the Schuller ministry’s messy bankruptcy, the buyer that came swooping in to pick up the remains of his empire in 2012 turned out to be the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange.

For the fire-sale price of $57.5 million the diocese acquired a property that had grown in the intervening years to 36 acres and that included not only the Neutra and Johnson buildings (and their adjacent towers) but a cylindrical, four-story.....

[.45 Long Colt]

God does not dwell in a temple made with hands.

[wideminded]

"On the face of it, Schuller and Johnson were a very strange match, the self-made Orange County televangelist and the smoothly moneyed New York architect who was also an atheist and gay. But at heart they were both salesmen. "

Q. What is the first rule of architecture?
A. Get the job.

- Philip Johnson