“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Resting spots for some well-known California architects
Bernard Maybeck 1862-1957: Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland
Charles Sumner Greene 1867-1957: Monterey City Cemetery, Monterey
Julia Morgan 1872-1957: Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland
Timothy Pflueger 1892-1946: Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma
Paul Williams 1894-1980: Evergreen Cemetery, Los Angeles
Wallace Neff 1895-1982: Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena
Albert Frey 1903-1998: Welwood Murray Cemetery, Palm Springs
Number of cemeteries in the US
100,000 plus
www.idreamof.com
The number of mega-churches in California
92 (a megachurch is a church having 2,000 or more attendees for a typical weekly service)
www.angelfire.com
Cathedrals in California
Oldest: The Cathedral of San Carlos Borromeo, Monterey, completed 1794
Newest: The Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, completed 2008
www.cathedralsofcalifornia.com
Some contemporary cathedrals with design accolades
The Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, 2008, Craig Hartman, SOM
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles, 2002, José Rafael Moneo
Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, 1961, 1980, 1990, Richard Neutra, Philip Johnson, & Richard Meier
www.wikipedia.com
Top quarterly published on religious architecture
Faith & Form: the Interfaith Journal on Religion, Art and Architecture
www.faithandform.com
Number of California architects in the AIA’s Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art & Architecture
320
www.aiacc.org
Three books on chapels
Dominique de Menil, The Rothko Chapel: Writings on Art and the Threshold of the Divine (Menil Collection, 2010)
Steven Holl, The Chapel of St. Ignatius (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999)
Daniele Pauly, Le Corbusier: The Chapel at Ronchamp (Birkhauser Architecture, 2007)
www.libraries.cca.edu/
Three books on the architecture of loss
James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (Yale University Press, 1993)
Marilyn Yalom,The American Resting Place (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008)
Neal Schwartz, editor, Emergent Memory: The National AIDS Memorial Competition (National AIDS Memorial Grove, 2005)
libraries.cca.edu/
Author David Meckel, FAIA, is Director of Research & Planning for the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco.
Originally published 4th quarter 2010, in arcCA 10.4, “Faith & Loss.”
