Cathedral Basilica - 3D MOdel

Visualizing Catholic Guilt

This work is a 3D recreation, with some creative liberties, of the Cathedral Basilica in St. Louis, MO. The basilica is frequently rated as one of the most beautiful in the Americas, and took over 70 years to build. Its mosaics line every wall, totaling over 41 million tiles of glass. Growing up Catholic, I visited the basilica on some special occasions, and it never failed to impress and intimidate. However, as I got older and began to leave the church, my relationship with it changed to a looming artifact of a religion being left behind. It is this relationship I sought to visualize here.

The environment is broken up into two states.

The first state of the basilica is its normal condition, how it looks day to day, or how it looks to a Catholic. It is no doubt that the cathedral is beautiful and impressive, but to a different audience it can feel different, thus the second state of Catholic guilt. In this state, I closed in the walls and pews to create a more claustrophobic environment, and used more dramatic spotlighting to highlight the judging looks of the apostles, the looming cross, and how it sees all of one’s vices- represented by bottles, syringes, and bongs- and judges them. Today, the feeling of the church is that in which the scale is oppressive as it looms over you. In this way, I changed the space, though in a subtle way, to completely change the feeling of it.

From my renders, I want to give the viewer an idea of the difference between the real and the imagined. My renders in the “real” attempt to be more descriptive of the space, showing it as it is from the pews, looking up at the domes, and looking down at the altar. They are wider angles that go for a more descriptive approach, and are lit in a way that fills the space while still highlighting details in mosaics. This lighting is similar to what exists in the real basilica, but brighter than the real thing. The second state needs to feel surreal, and so editing the space to be falling in on itself, the dramatic lighting, and close ups are meant to feel closer and more looming and oppressive. I tried to use a strong warm color palette to allude to the golden light of God frequently described in descriptions of epiphanies. I also added volumetric lighting so that the space had more of a dream-like quality to it.

This work was created in Blender.