Dome

Interior, main altar; The cathedral was designed by local architects John Michael Lee, Paul A. Ryan and Angus McSweeney, collaborating with internationally known architects Pier Luigi Nervi and Pietro Belluschi (at the time, the Dean of the School of Architecture at MIT.) Its saddle roof is composed of eight segments of hyperbolic paraboloids, in such a fashion that the bottom horizontal cross section of the roof is a square (the building is 255 ft. square) and the top cross section is a cross. In the interior, piers support the 19-story roof at each corner of the floor plan, each constructed to withstand ten million pounds of pressure. With a circumference of 24 feet at their narrowest points, the piers are embedded 90 feet down into the bedrock. Source: ArchDaily; http://www.archdaily.com/ (accessed 9/3/2015)