Los Angeles is a big, hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup, according to Raymond Chandler; Dorothy Parker said it was like 72 suburbs in search of a city centre.

The verdict is guilty on both counts - LA sprawls around out there like the discarded parts of an indestructible, pink, plastic flamingo that somebody never got around to assembling. But there's an undercurrent about that city that warns you not to take anything about it for granted. So perhaps it can't come as a complete surprise that three of the most exciting buildings to be built anywhere in the last few decades are there, in LA. One of them, the Disney Concert Hall, is still under construction, scheduled to open next year. Its architect is Frank Gehry, one of the best known and most respected of American architects - winner of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1989.

Another is the massive Getty Center, opened in 1997. It was designed by another Pritzker-winning (in 1984) architect, Richard Meier. The third, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, was opened just a few days ago. It was designed by a Spanish architect, Jos? Rafael Moneo - also a Pritzker prize-winner.

The architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff, described the Cathedral as “a landmark of remarkable architectural intelligence… among the great architectural achievements in recent American history”. Sadly, much of the media coverage of the opening went anywhere but to the heart of the story. The Cathedral cost $189 million to build. Many of the media gave space to those who said that money should have been given to the poor. Others said it was unseemly to open such a building at a time when the Church was involved in sexual scandal.

The Church had boasted that Our Lady of the Angels was the first Cathedral to have been built in the Western United States in the last 30 years. So still others in the media focused on the annoyance that claim caused in Dodge City, Kansas where, it was claimed, a Cathedral had been dedicated nine months before. The fact that it was a Cathedral more by technicality than design didn't seem to cut much ice with them. The Washington Post fixed the problem by referring to Our Lady as “the first major Catholic cathedral built in a generation”. But the Post, which covered the event intelligently, was the exception, not the rule… elsewhere, the trivialisation of a remarkable event was widespread.

The real story is this: All art is a kind of road map of the cutting edge of mankind's development as we journey into the future. Sometimes, an artist is skilful enough to create something that traps the meaning of that journey, at a point in time, making it forever accessible to us. That's true of lots of buildings. In the architecture of the Christian Church, it is true of St. Peter's in Rome, of St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey in London, of Notre Dame in Chartres, and of many others.

Now, apparently, Jos? Rafael Moneo has managed to create another masterpiece in his Cathedral in Los Angeles. Robert Campbell, the Boston Globe's Pulitzer prize-winning architecture critic, wrote this of Sr. Moneo, before he built the Cathedral: “Architecture has traditionally served to help us achieve presence in an otherwise frightening cosmos. Within the infinite universe of time and space, architecture creates one moment, one place.

“Moneo wishes it to continue to perform this function, to be a prop to our identity, to our knowledge of where and when we are, and therefore of who we are. A Moneo building creates an awareness of time by remembering its antecedents. It then layers this memory against its mission in the contemporary world. And it creates a perception of place by seeming to look around it, exchanging signals with the neighbouring world as ships at sea might flash semaphores.”

Moneo is no neophyte in this process. He built the Museum of Roman Art at Merida, in Spain, by weaving it among real Roman foundations and roadways. The walls of the Museum are built of Roman brick, making it appear to be an older building, renovated for a new use. Modern slabs of concrete and balconies of steel were threaded among these walls of ancient brick as if they were recent inserts. Thus, his building expresses three eras - the genuine past, the fictitious past that exists in the present, and the present.

In a sense, he does the same with the Cathedral. It is by no means hidden from the outside world. It occupies an entire city block overlooking the busy Hollywood Freeway. The Cathedral stands at the southeast corner of the walled plot. A tall, slim Campanile, or bell-tower, stands at the northwest. Two long, low buildings that house offices, meeting rooms and a residence run along the eastern edge. Between is a vast plaza.

The LA Times critic, Mr. Ouroussoff, describes the complex as “a sacred precinct that seems almost archaic”. Sr. Moneo says that when he designed the complex, he had in mind the sacred spaces of Byzantine and Romanesque churches, and Baroque churches that emphasise the metaphor of light - the way, he said, “of almost making material the presence of God”.

At Our Lady of the Angels, he used alabaster for the windows. Alabaster is a naturally occurring, delicate, translucent stone. It is easy to break, it loses its translucence in high heat and it will dissolve in sustained rain. But its milkiness filters light in an arresting way - the interior of the Cathedral glows and changes character as the sun moves. To overcome the problems alabaster might pose, each pane was double-glazed with laminated glass and ventilated, to disperse any accumulation of heat.

The walls of the complex are sand-coloured concrete. Embedded in one wall of the Cathedral building is a huge cross, framed by slabs of glowing alabaster.

At night, the lit interior makes it visible for miles, up and down Hollywood Freeway. The Cathedral is also a feast for the ears - there will eventually be 18 bells in the Campanile, which will be heard clearly for miles. In his homily for the Dedication Liturgy, Cardinal Mahoney specifically referred to this: “For those who lie ill in the USC-County Hospital and other nearby hospitals and rest homes, the peal of the great bells in the Campanile will ring a sound of solace.

“For the elderly and lonely, dwelling within the circle of these bells' sway, its tolling might become, in time, a familiar echo, evoking remembered joys. For those in the too-many and overpopulated jails downtown, we pray that the ringing of these Cathedral bells will soften their fettered burdens and instill some sense of inner peace that no one can snatch away. For our Catholic sensibilities, the sounding of Church bells rings out a clarion message of good news: we are redeemed, even us sinners, and summoned by the bells to a close intimacy with God.”

Sr. Moneo is known as someone who builds to create something that is not an autonomous artefact, but an event - a social and intellectual encounter between the visitor and the building. He builds so that this encounter is like the plot of a novel - in the sense that it proceeds from a beginning though a middle to an end. His aim is to create an inner voyage, so that the visitor is drawn away from the pollution and visual noise of contemporary life, into the silences and the spaces of contemplation.

When one enters the building, through huge, ornate bronze doors designed by sculptor Robert Graham, one leaves the hard cement and city noise of the plaza to walk on smooth limestone tiles, in silence, ascending gently. A row of chapels stretches out to the right, shielding the baptistry and the nave from view. The walls dividing the chapels have an odd rhythm, some close together, some farther apart. Slots between the chapels allow for carefully-framed views of what is beyond them. Light, filtered through an enormous alabaster clerestory, floods down into the chapels from above. There are no right angles. The walls converge, slightly. At the end, there is an abrupt turn and the Cathedral suddenly opens up. In the baptistry, four streams of water spill into a central pool.

The nave seats 2,000 people, so it is huge. The walls now open slightly towards the altar, and the floor is raked. The cross looms, 50 feet tall against the glowing alabaster, to the left of the altar. Moving through the building is an awe-inspiring, spiritually-intense experience, just as Sr. Moneo intended. But it is not only his intelligent design that is reflected in the Cathedral, the hard-boiled character of the City asserts itself as well. There is an under-Cathedral parking garage, where valet parking is available on special occasions, and you can leave your car anytime for $2.50 for 20 minutes.

There's a gift shop, sited conveniently near the ATMs, where bottles of Our Lady of the Angels Chardonnay sell for $24.99. And if you want, you can be buried in a crypt in the mausoleum in the basement under the building. The cost for eternal rest in the arms - well, perhaps the lap - of Our Lady? Three million clams for one of the good spots, and about a half a mil apiece for the others.

Rock on, City of Angels.