Architect Frank Gehry and the Cathedral That Might Have Been

National Catholic Register, 27 December 2025

Los Angeles passed over a generational architectural talent in building its cathedral, settling instead for a structure that fails to lift the human spirit.

The Catholic world is preparing for the centenary next year of the death of Antoni Gaudí, the Spanish architect who imagined the Sagrada Família church in Barcelona, a striking 20th-century conception of all creation singing the praises of God, in forms and shapes taken from the natural world. 

The Sagrada Família is Spain’s most visited site and is yet unfinished, though there are plans to complete it for the Gaudí centennial. And there is a cause for canonization open for the devout Catholic architect.

There will be no cause for canonization for Frank Gehry, the most celebrated architect of our day, who died last week at age 96. Gehry was born and raised in Toronto before moving with his Jewish family to Los Angeles in 1947, where he lived the rest of his life. He changed his name to Gehry from Goldberg to avoid antisemitism in mid-century California.

After the opening of his Guggenheim museum in Bilbao in 1997, Gehry vaulted to the top spot among the world’s “starchitects” and, at age 68, went on to author a series of stunning buildings. He adorned his two home cities with crowning achievements — the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003) and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (2008).

What Gehry did not design was a church, though he wanted to do so. In the 25 years Cardinal Roger Mahony served as the archbishop of Los Angeles, the building of a new cathedral was the longest shadow he cast. Decades from now, that Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, constructed on a magnificent site overlooking the Hollywood freeway, will remain, and those who look upon the lamentable architecture might wonder what might have been had Gehry overseen its construction.

Just a short walk from Our Lady of the Angels is the Disney Hall, which draws visitors from all over the world, even if they have no plans to listen to the Los Angeles Philharmonic inside. The building itself inspires, lifts up the spirit. 

Six years ago, while still an auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles, Bishop Robert Barron wondered what might have been if Gehry had been chosen as the architect for the new cathedral. It would have been a masterpiece, a complement to the concert hall, a fruitful dialogue between faith and culture in America’s largest diocese.

Across the Pacific, the Gothic grandeur of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, Australia, contrasts with the different, but similarly soaring, grandeur of the Opera House. Los Angeles, had Cardinal Mahony had the vision for it, could have had something similar, but in a way more impressive: two 21st-century buildings conversing with each other, both innovative and inspiring, both suitable for the West Coast, both singing to the soul. 

“When I’m in the city, I like to walk the downtown neighborhood,” wrote Barron in 2019:

My favorite building to look at while I’m on these strolls is the Disney Theatre, home base of the LA Philharmonic and the creation of Frank Gehry, probably the best-known architect in the world. Like many of Gehry’s other buildings, the Disney is marked by shimmering metallic surfaces, curving planes, and an overall playfulness of design. Some have suggested that the theatre’s exterior looks like the pages of a score that have just fallen from the conductor’s podium. That it is a captivating work of art is testified to by the crowds that regularly gather round it to gaze and to take photographs.

Bishop Barron diplomatically did not note that the cathedral was not his favorite building and that crowds do not gather around the hulking behemoth to gaze upon it. While in his early years Gehry did his share of modernist cubes, he turned away from them in later life as he found them unsuitable for concerts, for art galleries, for museums, for transcendent places that raise the human spirit. The Los Angeles cathedral is a perpetuation of that cube-like style on a mammoth scale, where the spirit struggles to breathe free.

“Soon after I arrived in the LA Archdiocese, I heard that Gehry was actually one of the finalists in the competition to design the new Cathedral here,” Bishop Barron wrote, evidently disappointed that he wasn’t chosen. “To say the very least, it would have been interesting to see what he would have done with that assignment.”

Bishop Barron then recalled an interview Gehry gave upon his 90th birthday. “After ruminating on his long and productive career, the architect said that he still harbored a great desire,” recalled the bishop:

I would like to design a church or a synagogue. A place that has transcendence. I’ve always been interested in space that transcends to something — to joy, pleasure, understanding, discourse, whatever a space can do to be part of the dialogue.

Could it have happened? The 1994 Northridge earthquake had damaged the original St. Vibiana’s Cathedral such that restoration was prohibitively expensive. Los Angeles had also grown immense, so Cardinal Mahony was right in deciding to build a new, much larger cathedral in a more prominent site. He was also right to avoid simply replicating on the West Coast the imposing Gothic cathedrals of the East Coast, like St. Patrick’s in New York, or even the splendid Romanesque Cathedral of St. Louis, in St. Louis. 

Continue reading at the National Catholic Register.