ABSTRACT
St. Mary’s Cathedral of San Francisco (1963–71) represents an exceptional case study of pushing the envelope in the design of sacred architecture. Designed by Pietro Belluschi, Pier Luigi Nervi, and local architects MSRL, the cathedral was one of the first religious building planned after the new liturgical provisions of the Second Vatican Council. The project is outstanding for several reasons. Belluschi outlined the cathedral as the union of huge hyperbolic paraboloids: such a structural solution required the skill of Nervi—at that time maybe the most important engineer in the world—who studied it using reduced scale models. Innovative for the liturgical scheme, ambitious for its architectural form and groundbreaking for structural features, the project of the cathedral is also intriguing for its logistical management: the history of the project was complex and problematic. The chapter is based on a wide-ranging research, carried out in Italy and the US.
