Crystal Cathedral
— — a church the sky pours into.
Not only on a wall.
“The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, about twenty miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed it in the late seventies for Robert Schuller's televised congregation, finished in 1980. The building is sheathed in roughly ten thousand panes of silvered glass set in a four-pointed plan. The Diocese of Orange bought the campus in 2012, and it now serves as Christ Cathedral.
Crystal Cathedral, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Crystal Cathedral stands on the campus of what is now Christ Cathedral, in Garden Grove, California, about twenty miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Robert Schuller commissioned the building from Philip Johnson and John Burgee for the Reformed Church in America congregation he had founded in a drive-in theatre in 1955. Construction finished in 1980. The sanctuary seats roughly 2,700 and rises on a four-pointed star plan to about 128 feet at its tallest point. The campus also carries Schuller's earlier Tower of Hope and Richard Neutra's Arboretum chapel.
The cathedral's envelope carries roughly 10,000 panes of mirrored glass, set in a white steel space frame and angled so the building sheds its own reflection of the southern California sky. Inside, the nave is daylit, and on bright afternoons the upper trusswork casts a faint grid across the seating. The Catholic renovation completed in 2019 added a system of folded white quatrefoils suspended below the glass, softening the glare and tuning the acoustics for liturgy without closing the room to the light.
For decades the building was the home set of the Hour of Power, the weekly Schuller broadcast that reached an estimated twenty million viewers at its peak. The ministry filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange bought the campus in 2012 for roughly fifty-eight million dollars. Renamed Christ Cathedral, it was reconsecrated on July 17, 2019. The annual Christmas and Easter pageants that had filled the calendar under Schuller gave way to daily Mass and major bilingual liturgies.