The Archdiocese of Los Angeles lost its historic cathedral, Saint Vibiana, to the Northridge earthquake of January 1994, which cracked its walls badly enough that the city condemned the building rather than repair it. Rather than rebuild in the same Baroque Revival style, the archdiocese commissioned the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, already a Pritzker Prize laureate, and what he produced on Temple Street broke deliberately with expectation: a structure built almost entirely from acute and obtuse angles, avoiding right angles throughout, clad in a warm toned concrete rather than stone.
The design drew criticism as well as praise before it opened. Some Angelenos had expected a cathedral in a recognizably Gothic or Spanish colonial idiom, and Moneo's austere modern forms, along with a budget that climbed from an initial one hundred fifty million dollars to nearly one hundred ninety million by completion in 2002, made the building a subject of public argument. The interior answers that austerity with light: rather than stained glass, its windows are cut from thin alabaster panels, admitting a diffuse golden glow across the nave.
The building's name reaches back further than 2002. Los Angeles was founded by Spanish colonists in 1781 under the full title El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles, Our Lady Queen of the Angels, a title the cathedral's own dedication invokes directly.
The cathedral today seats three thousand worshippers, houses a mausoleum with over a thousand crypts, and serves as the seat of an archdiocese of roughly five million Catholics, the largest in the United States, hosting the ordinations, funerals and civic Masses that scale of a diocese requires.