Our Lady of Lourdes Cathedral: Spokane, Washington

IN THE MEDIA :

Below is an original article from Traditional Building magazine January/February 2001. Volume 14/No. 1. Article reprinted by permission.

A New Bronze Age for Our Lady of Lourdes

By Michael Carey

When the Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes in Spokane, Washington, decided to replace its three existing sets of wood doors with bronze, they turned to a well-known sculptor and a specialist foundry. The resulting doors display a combination of fine artistry and engineering excellence. 

Entryways have traditionally been the loci of both ornament and the use of monumental scale, most notably in public and religious architecture. One of the earliest surviving examples of this tradition are the great bronze doors of the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. The doors are said to have been originally commissioned by Julius Caesar around 52 B.C.E. for the Roman Curia, which was the seat of the Senate, and installed in the Basilica in the mid-17th century during one of its numerous renovations. These bronze doors thus came to symbolize the glory of the Christian God, rather than that of the Roman Empire, using the same combination of impressive scale and material.

Perhaps the most famous bronze doors to any religious structure, however, are those created by Lorenzo Ghiberti in the 15th century for the entrance to the baptistery of the Church of San Giovanni in Florence. The doors are gilded bronze, and are considered one of the great masterpieces of Western art. Ghiberti's doors have also served as something af a template for the design of monumental ecclesiastical bronze doors over the centuries, with their division of surface into relief panels depicting Biblical scenes, saints, and other Church figures. 

The influence of Ghiberti, in terms of style and choice of material, can certainly be seen in the bronze doors of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes in Spokane, Washington. The Cathedral commissioned the three sets of doors in early 1999, through a donation by Church member Betty Wheeler in honor of her first husband, Dr. John Murphy.  

The history of the Cathedral itself reaches back to 1881, when Jesuit Father Joseph Cataldo converted a carpenter's shop near Spokane Falls into the Church of St. Joseph. Five years later, a large brick church dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes replaced the original. Work began on the present Church in 1903, and ten years later it became the Cathedral of the newly created Diocese of Spokane. 

The Cathedral approached noted Washington sculptor Dorothy Fowler with the bronze door project. Fowler had studied at San Jose State University in California, Spokane Community College, and the Scottsdale Art School before embarking on a long and successful career of public and private commissions. She, in turn, approached her long-time collaborator Valley Bronze of Oregon. Valley Bronze's foundry, located in the Wallowa Mountains of Northeastern Oregon, has earned a reputation for producing fine-art castings of the highest quality. The firm also offers full consultation on design, reproduction, finishing and accessory products. In addition to bronze, they also do lost-wax casting in silver and stainless steel, and offer engineering services for the proper installation of larger works. 

Fowler designed each set of the door's 12 sculpted panels, following in Ghiberti's footsteps, and a scalloped lunette. The uppermost pair of bronze panels are set above lock rails and are slightly larger than the others. Each door is identical on both sides. 

The central bronze doors depict the Apostles Peter and Paul in the larger top panels, along with the symbols associated with the other apostles. The scalloped lunette above the doors features a depiction of Christ. The east bronze doors are topped with a lunette which depicts Mary and the infant Christ. The door panels depict Matthew, mark, and ten Saints from the first ten centuries of the Church. The west bronze doors have a depiction of the young Mary and her mother in the lunette, with Luke, John, and nine Saints from the 11th to the 19th centuries of church history as well as one panel depicting Mother Theresa, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta.  

Fowler sculpted the lunettes and panels in clay, from which molds were made using coats of liquid rubber. Hot wax was poured into the molds, allowed to cool for a shot time, then poured out, producing hollow wax copies of the original sculptures.  

Second molds, rigid ceramic shells, were formed by dipping the wax duplicates repeatedly in a vat containing liquid slurry and coating them with silica sand. The shells were then fired in an oven to melt out the wax, and also to harden the ceramic for receiving the molten bronze.

Bronze was then poured into the cups of the ceramic shells molds, into the space left behind by the "lost wax". The bronze was allowed to cool, and then the ceramic shells were broken off to reveal the bronze within.  

The panels were then formed together into a bronze "skin" to be fitted over the internal frames of the bronze doors, and finished. The inside of each panels was cast as a plate, completely solid with a flat back, so that could be easily attaches to the frames. The internal frames themselves were constructed using a double stainless-steel structure with a central layer of thermal insulation.

The firm engaged an engineering consultant and decided on using three sets of hinges, in bronze clad steel, and deep anchoring. Ten to twleve inch anchors, driven through the brick exterior and into the masonry, were used on each bronze door.

An unusual feature of the project was that Valley Bronze, who had not undertaken a bronze door project before, constructed the individual doors sets in series, each taking about seven months to complete. "We were on a steep learning curve with the first set of doors," says Valley Bronze president David S. Jackman, "and we put the knowledge gained in the early stages of the project to good use". Looking at the results in the firm's work, it is hard to deny that they learned their lessons well.

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