The Cathedral of Saint Joseph: Prairie Romanesque
Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota
When Bishop Thomas O'Gorman attended the dedication of the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota in nineteen fifteen, he came home with a commission in mind. He wanted the same architect for Sioux Falls: Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, the French-born designer who had given Saint Paul its monumental French Romanesque towers. Masqueray accepted the Sioux Falls commission. He did not live to see the building finished, he died in nineteen seventeen, but the design he left was executed faithfully.
Construction on the Cathedral of Saint Joseph began in the summer of nineteen fifteen. The building is set on a Latin cross plan, built of Indiana limestone over a foundation of native South Dakota granite. The twin towers at its facade end in conical roofs, a signature Masqueray gesture that appears in his work elsewhere. But in Sioux Falls he added something specific to this place: the shingles on those conical spires were designed to resemble heads of grain, wheat, the crop that defined the diocese surrounding it. The prairie made it into the architecture of the church.
The cathedral was completed and dedicated on May seventh, nineteen nineteen. Its final cost was three hundred ninety thousand dollars. It is the Mother Church of the Diocese of Sioux Falls, established by Pope Leo the Thirteenth in November of eighteen eighty-nine, the same year South Dakota achieved statehood.
The interior holds mosaics and stained glass assembled over decades of additions and donations. The nave is long and proportioned to feel narrow at human scale, which draws the eye toward the apse. Masqueray understood the geometry of reverence.
Outside the city moves around it. The cathedral has been here longer than the tallest buildings downtown, longer than the credit card industry, longer than nearly any institution the city possesses. It was built to suggest permanence in a place where permanence was still something to be argued for.
