Oakland’s Luminous New Cathedral
LIGHTING THE INTERIOR
A ceiling in the form of a smaller ellipse caps the interior; it represents a vesica piscis, the symbolic fish used by the persecuted early Christians to identify their places of worship. (Ichthys, the Greek word for fish, contains the letters for the code, Jesus Christ Son of God, Savior.) The ceiling features a diagonal grid of folded and perforated aluminum panels. The panels are fixed at varying angles to diffuse daylight from a clear glass roof above throughout the interior, and to direct morning light from this source to strike the altar and the Omega wall behind it.
Photograph of the model from SOM
The exterior’s layered structure enhances the transmission of daylight, which varies with the time of day, to the interior. Rays of light entering through the outer curtain wall of fritted glass strike the top surface of the angled wooden louvers and bounce off of the bottom surface of the louver above
Photograph by Sally B. Woodbridge
At night, the louvered vaults are illuminated from below with artificial light transmitted through the interior in the same way. The warm tone of the Douglas fir walls enhances the cathedral’s lantern-like glow in the dark of night
INTERIOR CONDITIONING
Although the height of the cathedral made conditioning the interior a challenge, the need for heating and cooling was limited to the lower fifteen feet occupied by the congregation. The solution was to install a radiant heating system in the concrete floor. Cooling is accomplished via conditioned air entering through floor grilles beneath the pews. As this air warms and rises, it is expelled to the outside through motorized dampers at the base of the ceiling’s oculus.
