A Cathedral in Our Time, 1967

One of my favourite postwar buildings is Frederick Gibberd's Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, or Paddy's Wigwam.





The circular crown design, its spectactular wrap around stained glass and the dramatic realisation of the form with its diagonal buttresses makes an instant impact, and it's as beautiful inside as it is outside. It's a much more extravagant design than is usual with Gibberd, who while adding decorative touches in his more typical buildings, is also usually rather restrained.





Here, like Spence in Coventry, he allows the 'romantic modern' in him break free. In many ways this was the joy of designing modernist churches and cathedrals, they allowed otherwise rather austere designers the opportunity to display a decorative side they generally kept hidden in their other work.





 In Liverpool Gibberd makes the building itself feel like a small sacred object, like a font, crown or orb, scaled up to an immense size. It's something we're perhaps more familiar with from designs by Oscar Niemeyer than those rather more dowdy British modernists.





This film shows its construction and was made to commemorate the opening of the cathedral in May 1967, and can be watched on the BFI player here.


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