Raleigh Cathedral

Here is the proposed new cathedral for the Diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina. What is exciting about this design is that it is not only traditional in style, but it is being built by an architect who understands and has studied not only traditional Catholic architecture, but traditional ways of building.

It's great that more and more parishes and pastors are planning traditionally styled churches, but too often those who want a traditionally styled church simply go to the local architecture firm and ask for it to 'look traditional'. So what happens is Joe Architect, who is used to building dentist offices and shopping malls and hospitals and schools gets the job to build a church. He puts up the usual steel box, and then to make it 'look traditional' he slaps in a few arches and 'churchy' looking decorations made out of studs and plasterboard, and what you end up with is a church that just looks like a dentist's office, but with arched windows or interior arches that don't really do anything.

Then there is one step better than that, where the architect understands traditional church architecture, but he still builds with a steel structure which he then clads with a brick or stone veneer and with pretend stone effect on the inside--complete with faux arches and plastic groin vaulting. Often these churches even come with walls that are given 'the illusion of depth'. Many people will like these churches a bit more than the dentist office churches, but will still find them too much like Harry Potter world--where the engineers and designers do wonderful things with concrete. What is lacking is an inner integrity between method and materials.

I'm pleased to say that we have hired an exciting young architect/designer for our new church at Our Lady of the Rosary parish. Andrew Gould, of New World Byzantine, has already produced some exciting schematic drawings for a Romanesque style church, and we are soon to move on to the stage of having some watercolor renderings. He is teaming up with Matthew Alderman, who is going to work on the interior designs.

I hope to write extensively about architecture and the new church at Our Lady of the Rosary parish in the coming months. That Raleigh is designing a traditional new cathedral, and that Catholicism in the South is on the rise means that we may have the opportunity to establish a renaissance in Catholic architecture. It would be exciting for various young architects to show what they can do to build churches that are traditional and yet suited to Catholic worship for the twenty first century.