HDI Visits: St. Basil Catholic Church, Los Angeles

Churches are the original museums and we always enjoy visiting a new church or cathedral that we haven’t seen yet. While in LA, we visited the St. Basil Catholic Church, which is located at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Kingsley Drive. The church was built in 1969 to replace the older St. Basil, which had been constructed in 1920, badly damaged in a 1943 fire, and rebuilt. The new building was designed by A. C. Martin and Associates to evoke the feel of a very early Christian church or a monastery, with unadorned exterior surfaces and an interior that felt like a place of refuge. The church is a  confident Brutalist style incorporating twelve angular, irregular concrete towers with a rough finish that exposes the aggregate. The sculptor Claire Falkenstein created the stained-glass windows, as well as the doors and gates, which are considered her finest work. We love Falkenstein’s work and we have a structure-graphic, unique impression of metal sculptural forms on handmade paper in our collection from 1955, which you can find here
The interior also features carvings of the Fourteen Stations of the Cross created by Italian sculptor, Franco Assetto. Assetto titled the art piece, Via Crucis. A mixed media painting by Franco Asset entitled “Joy for a New Day” from 1962, also in our collection can be found when you scroll to the end of this post.
Enjoy our photos from our visit to St. Basil!