My grandfather was the Church architect and was given the assignment to design and build two temples to take the pressure off of the Salt Lake Temple. After receiving the assignment he was traveling with a businesses companion on a flight from NY to London and after dinner he had an all night vision open up where he was shown exactly how to design the building in every detail, he described what he was seeing to his fellow Church employee. When he returned from the trip he drafted the design as it had been shown to him and presented it to the First Presidency for approval. It was revolutionary in many ways and made endowment work much more efficient. Within months of opening Provo and Ogden temples were outperforming Salt Lake by a wide margin. It astonished the senior brethren including some naysayers who apologized to my grandfather.
Because it cannot be mistaken for any other thing but the Provo temple -- that is why it works for me. Fun article. (Now, let's hope they don't tear it down in the name of progress or updating. i.e. murals in Manti and SLC temples, sigh.)
Love this. Timely and thoughtful, and reminds me of profound times in my life that are rooted in this temple: preaching Christ and His Restoration at 19 to a divided Germany and beginning of a consecrated, married life.
My grandfather was the Church architect and was given the assignment to design and build two temples to take the pressure off of the Salt Lake Temple. After receiving the assignment he was traveling with a businesses companion on a flight from NY to London and after dinner he had an all night vision open up where he was shown exactly how to design the building in every detail, he described what he was seeing to his fellow Church employee. When he returned from the trip he drafted the design as it had been shown to him and presented it to the First Presidency for approval. It was revolutionary in many ways and made endowment work much more efficient. Within months of opening Provo and Ogden temples were outperforming Salt Lake by a wide margin. It astonished the senior brethren including some naysayers who apologized to my grandfather.
Because it cannot be mistaken for any other thing but the Provo temple -- that is why it works for me. Fun article. (Now, let's hope they don't tear it down in the name of progress or updating. i.e. murals in Manti and SLC temples, sigh.)
Love this. Timely and thoughtful, and reminds me of profound times in my life that are rooted in this temple: preaching Christ and His Restoration at 19 to a divided Germany and beginning of a consecrated, married life.
Adding a bit of poetry from Zachary Stevenson, regarding Provo, Utah architecture generally, that I think applies here:
But the beauty, strictly speaking, was neither architectural nor geological
It was probably parochial, tied as it was to the particular sensibilities of a single human mind,
But it was more than that too
Because the structures of Provo are part and parcel of a breathtaking and ongoing response to a theology, a religion and a God
That ask that we never stop learning nor loving nor building nor saving
Describing this as a representative product of mid century modernism is a historical crime. Sorry.