In Defense of the Provo Temple

“Some say...that [it] stinketh, but...to me [it] doth not stink.”

Welcome to the Provo Temple. It’s the temple that we all love to make fun of, to point out embarrassing facts about—things like “Did you know that the spire used to be orange?” Some say it looks like a birthday cake, others say it’s an example of the worst aspects of mid-century modern architecture. To various observers the temple appears a Reuben sandwich (with the single spire as the wooden pick), a melted snowman (the carrot nose the once-orange spire), a spacecraft, a cupcake with a candle, etc. To me, the main cladding around a roughly circular form sometimes evokes an endless round of chevrons, or a circle of Greek soldiers with tower shields. And sometimes the rectangular windows on the first floor seem slightly reminiscent of caskets, which strikes a morbid note.

Essentially, it’s all true—to one degree or another. Because, let’s be honest, the Provo Temple is an easy target. Perhaps its fundamental aesthetic issue is that it must contend with the stunning rock walls of Rock Canyon, and mountain ramparts, immediately behind it. Though our architectural flights of fancy come and go, the landscape will continue as it ever has, nearly immortal. Building any structure so close to a mountain will eventually yield some fundamental doubts about civilization.

Maybe another reason for our blistering criticism is that modern LDS chapels are almost purely functional and utilitarian structures with little ornamentation or distinguishing aesthetic features. Nowadays, the Mormon escape from aesthetic purgatory depends upon the temple. Because of these heightened expectations, many of us are ever ready to play architecture critic—and make our distaste known quickly and loudly. The Provo Temple’s bold design and muted ornamentation contrasts with the newest wave of temples that are more traditional in form (and predictable too—even before a temple is constructed, at least in the U.S., we can make a pretty good guess about how it’s going to look), making it an easy target to vent our aesthetic frustration.

Probably the most obvious reason for this criticism, though, is our general impatience with mid-century modern architecture (a movement within which the Provo Temple can perhaps be roughly situated). Some of these structures are not easy to love, and they all seem to require some effort on our part to come to understand—something we probably aren’t naturally inclined to do. Furthermore, they reflect a giddy optimism about the future that seems out of place at the moment. In contemporary politics we speak of crises and averting looming disasters. In the 1960s the adventure of post-war modernity felt new and shiny (admittedly, I’m kind of assuming this), a sheen that has oxidized a bit over the intervening decades. Could our fascination with “revival” styles (Colonial, Classical, etc.) reflect a nostalgia clearly seen in our politics?

Whatever the subconscious reason behind my initial reaction (which seems to be the standard one) to the Provo Temple, I have come (slowly) to love the building.¹ This appreciation didn’t blossom overnight, or even the first hundred times I walked past it. It all happened quite unexpectedly, but I think I can roughly date the beginning of this paradigm shift to learning more about the context of its design. In “David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism,” the author relates the moment when the Church Architect’s rendering was shown to President McKay. After a pregnant pause, someone asked President McKay, “Does this offend you?” He replied that it did not, and the rest is history. This anecdote helps frame the audacity of the building. Though it represented a novel design for temples, among the first of the so-called Space Age temples (with interiors fit for Star Trek), it reflected the zeitgeist of the age. Though tumultuous, the 60s was a decade of tremendous growth in the Church. The optimism of the age, a sheer exuberance about the possibilities of modern life, was reflected in futuristic architectural designs and experimental structures.

But the design wasn’t merely a product of the feeling of the age. The designers knew the structure had to be built on a tight budget. So they designed a functional temple where the endowment would be newly presented via film. Some see the style of the Provo Temple (and the similarly designed Ogden temple as well) as a paradigm shift, from emphasizing the temple as a place of refuge, to one emphasizing the temple as a machine. While the design was influenced by financial constraints, I think the simplicity of the building has its own quiet kind of eloquence—though it’s entirely valid to see the structure, especially the stream-lined interior, as a commentary on an ecclesiastical culture in which quantitative ambitions sometimes eclipse qualitative care.

Once I understood a bit of the context of the temple’s design and construction, I found myself more intrigued by the structure. And flipping through a guide to American architecture I checked out from the library, I was able to better place the structure in its time period. I have come to love the soaring straight lines and imaginative placement of glass common to the mid-century modern style, and often find myself scouting out nearby neighborhoods for more instances of this style (I highly recommend Provo’s “Tree Streets” for mid-century modern spotting).

I don’t really have the vocabulary to technically describe this building (at least in any way that does it justice) but the Society of Architectural Historians’ page on the temple succinctly and expertly describes what I cannot.

“The approximately 130,000-square-foot building consists of a single-story square base, a circular glass ring, and a two-story rectangular volume with rounded corners. The exterior is of precast concrete, gold anodized aluminum grills, and bronze glass panels; the tiered spire was originally finished in gold and anodized aluminum but later painted white with the 2003 addition of the gold Angel Moroni statue…The visual drama of the upper structure recalls the Crown of Thorns, articulated here in thin slivers of glass and concrete with bas-relief arches. The upper volume and the spire mirror the verticality of the mountains behind. The entrance facade has three identical groups of windows, with each featuring six floor-to-ceiling slit windows that evoke pointed arches but are truncated by the concrete cantilever, which emphasizes the use of modern materials and changes in construction techniques.”

As noted above, the structure itself seems deeply symbolic, subordinating any specific ornamentation and detailing to the overall form. The entire form of the Provo Temple seems to denote something—whether it is the Crown of Thorns, the Israelite’s cloud by day/pillar at night, or salvation machine. Whether you accept any or all of the possible interpretations—the temple remains fundamentally interesting.

Although the detailing is relatively muted, there are enough hints of detailing to draw you closer to its walls, and reward you with the tidy detailing that makes this Space Age temple seem intimate as well. The “square base” is one of my favorite parts of the design. I can’t exactly describe why, but it has to do with the sleekness of the shape, and how the walls curve outwards near the concrete cantilever until it snaps back to 90 degrees where geometric shapes form a frieze-like line encircling the entire base. It’s such an unusual shape, and it keeps me coming back to take another look.

The concrete in the upper floors, the vertical “shields” or “chevrons” with the bas-relief arches, form another visually stunning part of the structure. At dusk, depending on the weather, this part of the temple especially seems to catch fire, while the entire structure is bathed in a warm glow. In that moment it is perfectly placed in front of the mountains and seems to belong there—as if our “spaceship” touched down millennia ago. At the seam of the valley, as if on the very ledge of the Rocky Mountains, the temple points heavenward while also grounding me in Provo and my surroundings, providing a sense of place.

Some things are easy to find beautiful, other things take more time. There are some places and things so intuitively appealing that we give ourselves over entirely to them. There are other places, however, for which beauty—in our eyes at least—comes very slowly, and by some effort on our part. And it is these places that remind us of the true nature of beauty. That it is not only something to be received, but something bestowed, at times, from the observer to the observed. The Transcendentalists believed the true mark of virtue was to see the miraculous in the simple—to make beautiful the seemingly ordinary. The poet Mary Oliver expressed a similar sentiment—“To pay attention, that is our proper and endless work.” In this way the things around us reflect, to some degree, what we invest in them. The beauty of the Provo Temple may not be intuitive, but a reflection of the care and attention we bestow on it—and a measure of our attention to our surroundings generally. I don’t want to imply that someone’s attention can be accurately measured solely by their reaction to the Provo Temple, but reflecting on its change for me—from an embarrassing eye-sore to a fascinating historical monument—has helped reinforce the point that we have, in our proximity, all we need. The good life is all around us, the trick is seeing it.

1. https://sunstonemagazine.com/lessons-in-mormon-modernism/ — This article approaches the aesthetic problem of the Provo Temple in very similar ways, though it’s a much more design-oriented article (meaning you can tell the author knows what they’re talking about when discussing architecture), and I highly recommend reading this article—especially as it compares the Provo Temple with the old Ogden Temple.