The Crown Is Consecrated

Kettledrums sounded, trumpets blared, and an Irish Guards band played martial airs in the streets as 2,000 invited dignitaries and 500,000 Roman Catholics celebrated the consecration of Liverpool's new Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King on Whitsunday. Constructed over the past 41 years at a cost of $11,200,000, the cone-shaped cathedral in concrete rises to a stately stained-glass lantern tower capped with a crown of finials, which lights up at night atop one of Liverpool's two hills. The other hill, half a mile away, is already topped by the Gothic spires of the Anglican cathedral.

Satellite Chapels. The new Roman Catholic cathedral, already dubbed "Paddy's Wigwam," "The Rocket," "The Crown" and "The Pope Goes to the Moon," nonetheless provides both Catholics and architects with occasion for rejoicing. The winning design was selected in 1960 by a committee headed by Liverpool's archbishop, John Cardinal Heenan (now Archbishop of Westminster in London), from among 300 submitted. It turned out to have been executed by Congregationalist Frederick Gibberd, 59, the architect and city planner responsible for London's Heathrow Airport and the new town of Harlow.

"I never build things unless there is some reason for them," says Gibberd. The new cathedral's shape derived from the emphasis on the high altar, visible to the congregation from all sides. This dictated a cathedral-in-the-round, with 2,000 worshipers seated no more than 80 feet from the altar. He surrounded his circular nave with 16 individually shaped satellite chapels and anterooms, each set off from the next by 1-in.-thick blue stained-glass panels, extended a piazza to roof over an English Wrenaissance crypt built in the 1930s, and made the lower level a 200-car parking area with elevators from it for invalids.

Apostles' Bells. Gibberd hit upon the idea of placing a tower directly over the altar's baldachin (or canopy) and using it to light the cathedral because "it's all part of the same thing." To be sure, the idea of having a 2,000-ton tower suspended over space presented structural problems, but these, as Gibberd put it, can be solved "if you get a lot of chaps together with some real know-how." Prestressed concrete was used for the 16 radial buttresses, while the roof was prefabricated from huge slabs of concrete hauled into place by the largest tower crane in Europe after a model of the cathedral was tested in a wind tunnel to prove it would withstand the impact of three Boeing 707s.

The cathedral's electrically operated bells, named for the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are separately housed in the 90-ft, freestanding bell tower that looms at the entrance. "I congratulate the architect on the excellence of his design," said Cardinal Heenan as the bells pealed on Whitsunday. "He spoke in a new language, but has not used any tricks which would embarrass those who will come later. This is authentic art, and it will be admired so long as men cherish beauty."

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