35 thoughts on “Salt Lake Temple Under Construction”

1. I’ll confess that I’ve never read any detailed description of the construction of the Salt Lake Temple. And I’ve never worked on the construction of a stone building. But I’ve done a fair amount of building construction.

   So I’m surprised by your statement that the building was just a shell, without any interior walls or floors. There are reasons, both practical and structural, for building interior floors as the exterior walls rise, and, given the size of the temple, some interior walls might have been required to help bear the weight of those floors.

   The practical reasons: the floors would have provided a platform for workmen to stand on as the walls grew higher.

   The structural reason: floors tie the walls together and give them a stability that a free-standing wall does not have–even a wall that is six-feet thick at the top.

   I just found a short article by Richard Cowan about the building of the temple which refers to the relatively late (mid-1880s) interior design changes. But such design changes are not necessarily inconsistent with earlier construction of floors and some bearing walls (if necessary).

2. I’m going by letters and other comments written during construction — I’ve wondered how you can insert floors after walls have gone up. Put a question mark by what I wrote, though.

3. West Temple and South Temple, right?

4. South Temple and Main, wouldn’t it be?

5. We have a book on the construction of the SLC temple. I’ll try to take a look at it soon. We just toured the Provo City Center temple yesterday, and they started with just a shell for that. One of the real benefits of spending so much time on the shell of the SLC temple is that by the time it was finished, things like interior plumbing, electrical wiring, and elevators had been invented so that they didn’t have to rip up the interior to add them.

6. Noce thing about stereopticon images like this is, if you cross your eyes just right, you see the image in 3d. Once my eyes had locked in, it was really cool to look at.

7. This is great!! I’ll save this one as a companion for the one I found and posted on my blog from a short time later: http://www.moderatebutpassionate.com/2012/03/eyes-on-temple-from-prison.html

8. The books “Every Stone a Sermon” (Richard Holzapfel) and “The Salt Lake Temple:A Monument to the People” (Charles Hamilton), go into detail on the construction and architecture of the Salt Lake Temple and may help answer some of the questions asked above aboutjust how the construction was done.

9. The original walls of the City Center temple were partially dismantled (removing the interior two rows of brick, and leaving the exterior three) and the thickness replaced with a layer of steel-reinforced concrete. So I’m not sure that’s an apt comparison.

   The detail that caught my eye was the modern looking tabernacle roof. I thought it was shingled (with regular wood shingles) up through the turn of the 20th century.

   Now I know better!

10. Thanks, Andrewh. I’ll have to take a look at them.

    Provo City Center isn’t necessarily a good comparison, since it was a reconstruction after a fire, and a lot of things happened there that would not have happened in a standard construction project.

    There are a couple of ways to build and add floors later. One would be to leave holes on the inner side of the stones that would fit the timbers/floor joists. A second would be to cut those holes after the stone walls were completed. And in either case, you could add the beams/joists after the walls were completed up to the square.

    As you can deduce, it would be impossible to have beams that spanned the entire width of the building unless they were installed before the walls above them were built. Which is one more reason that I’d think they’d have placed those beams as the exterior walls reached their planned level.

11. I can see the floor to the Assembly Room being in place prior to roofing; but as I recall on the temple’s main level the floor varies in height depending on whether you are in the world room or terrestrial or celestial rooms. One assumes that any floor installed for that level before about 1890 would have been of a uniform height and, thus, had to be torn out once the interior plans were finalized.

12. Either torn out or built up. The latter is easier as a matter of construction: start at the creation room level as the initial level of the entire floor, and then build up from there.

    What I should do is find a book that describes the whole building process and quit speculating about how I would have done it if I’d lived in Salt Lake City 130 years ago!

13. The current interior of Logan was built from the ground up, inside the emptied shell. But of course, that’s still a different case than the original construction in Salt Lake, and the salvage job in Provo. I don’t know about Vernal and Copenhagen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the construction was done the same way as in Logan.

    If memory serves, the interior of the SL Temple was done entirely within the last year (though I don’t know if that includes construction of the floors). So the constantly changing interior plans during the temple’s construction wouldn’t have necessitated any corresponding interior remodeling.

14. In the case of Logan, it’s a steel frame building that has the shell of the old building attached, although half the building was gutted, the frame built in, and then the other half so that something would be holding up the walls.

    As far as the temple, I’d thought the floors were added after, but reading The house of the Lord, it simply mentions that the interior was unfinished when the angel Moroni was placed. Floorplans weren’t finalized until the last stage of construction, originally it would have been like Nauvoo with two very large assembly halls.

    In any case, as for how the floors would be placed, the original blueprints (https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE538353, see transverse sections, and make sure you have plenty of time to look at the rest of the drawings), show the beams lying on top of the walls (or on top of recesses in the walls) rather than built into them, so they could have been placed at any time. Now that I took the time to look over those, there are some drawings that show the beams set in the walls as well, but drawings with the actual floor plan seem to show more of the resting on the wall design, not to mention the changes in design would mean they hadn’t been built yet. One of the drawings is dated 1885, so I think it’s safe to say interior of the temple was empty at least through the mid 1880’s.

15. Thanks, Seth, for your contribution to the conversation–and for the link to those blueprints. I could probably spend the rest of the day doing something other than what my clients hope I’m doing! 🙂

    The drawing at this page appears to show floor beams set into a niche (I don’t know what term the builders would have used) in the stone. Without additional drawings, it’s hard to draw firm conclusions, but I think if I were working at the site, I would want to put the beam in place before setting that stone above it.

16. I dusted off an old copy of “Every Stone a Sermon” last evening. I couldn’t find that it says anything directly about when the floors/interior walls were installed, but it does have a photograph of the temple–walls complete except for the towers–and daylight is clearly visible through both layers of round windows and the intervening layer of arched windows. It also mentions several worker deaths, including (in the 1870s, I think) a worker who fell from a wall sixty feet into the basement.

    That suggests to me that there was no intervening floor, either to interrupt the flow or sunlight or to break the fall of unfortunate workers.

17. Mark, it seems that you can’t link directly to images.

    I just spent longer than I should have looking through the drawings, unfortunately it seems I can’t link, but putting them in order there’s a bit of a timeline.
    [[https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/StreamGate?dps_pid=FL538537&dps_dvs=1453424651296~330][June 1884]], Even after the Logan temple was dedicated with endowment rooms, the Salt Lake Temple still followed the same design as Kirtland and Nauvoo.
    [[https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/StreamGate?dps_pid=FL538541&dps_dvs=1453424651296~330][April 1885]], Rooms are in on the first floor.
    [[https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/StreamGate?dps_pid=FL538545&dps_dvs=1453424651296~330][July 1886]], Changes in the trusses, upper level removed from assembly room.
    [[https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/StreamGate?dps_pid=FL538570&dps_dvs=1453424651296~330][undated, follows current design so probably latest]], Varying floor levels in rooms, roof trusses have been changed to steel, and it appears the floor trusses as well. The center wall is load bearing in the basement, and possibly the first floor.

    From the timeline in [[https://www.lds.org/ensign/1993/03/every-window-every-spire-speaks-of-the-things-of-god?lang=eng][this ensign article]], the walls were 80ft high in 1882, and 160 feet (nearly done) in 1889, so the plans changed several times during the final phase of construction. I’m guessing the beams fit in the spaces below windows, and then flooring was laid over. It probably helped that the walls taper the higher they get. I’m out of time to look into it any further, but I’d love to hear more details.

18. Ah, and I went ahead and posted with links that don’t work.

19. The drawing that I attempted to link to was titled “Sections of basement, first and third floors, and battlements” which is just past the bottom of the first page of links on that site with the architectural drawings. The location of the beams in those drawings suggests that they were placed during the construction, and not after the walls were laid above the level of those beams.

    And I don’t mean to quibble–I’m just genuinely curious about the construction process, and wonder how it was consistent with, or differed from, current practices.

    It’s possible that beams were set in place without the floor joists and flooring being added until later in the process. That would account for the drawing I tried to link to and the issues that JimD raised in his comment 16.

20. Architecture and temples are things I find interesting enough to spend hours poring over the details. and now I’m pretty curious about the building process too. More than just how and when the floors were built, this has raised a few interesting points for me about how the plans changed.

    It seems that these drawings are in chronological order, the first is dated February, 1853, and details on interior decorations of rooms and stained glass windows come at the end. The second drawing, labelled ‘basement’, is a floorplan noting that the walls are to be adobe. ‘Horizontal cross-section of adobe walls’ shows that in March, 1854, using adobe bricks was still under serious consideration, around doors and windows wood and stone have been added as well (Just speculating, but I’d imagine all the detail work would be stone, and wood would be there to support the openings. Adobe can’t be exposed to the elements, so the temple would be covered in stucco, with stone in places for decoration.) The cross section with the inset beams is from the same time, so I think it was only in that early stage of plans that the beams were inset, perhaps because of structural issues having to do with building with adobe.

    “Window elevation and section”, sometime in 1856 (if anyone can read that date better, please comment), if it’s an exterior wall, shows timber reinforcement, so still adobe.
    “Temple entrance plan” (undated, not after 1857) clearly shows stone courses in one of the tower walls, so by four years into construction, building materials had been finalized. I’d imagine the foundations had to be stone in either case, so this probably wouldn’t have impacted construction.

    That’s all the time I have to speculate right now. But I’d say the inset beams all came from an early version of the plans which was designed for adobe walls. The image I tried to link to in my last post is “Transverse section”(14th from the bottom, rather beat up piece of paper that’s been taped back together in places). It seems to show pairs of steel beams resting on a load bearing wall in the center of the temple, which does rather mess with my image of pioneers with their oxen pulling wagons of wood from the mountains to hand-carve into the all the fine workmanship seen there today. The beams are resting on a ledge below windows on each floor ( the stone courses are exposed on the left side so they can be labelled, on the right side it’s a little clearer).

    If anyone has more speculation, or Truman Angell’s notes from his mission, I’d be interested.

21. I have nothing to add but am following this conversation avidly. If you come to any conclusion, let’s pull it together for a post, or at least I’ll write a short post pointing to this so it doesn’t get lost.

22. Interesting additions to the discussion, Seth! Thanks.

    First, steel? It certainly would have been possible to use steel in the construction of the temple–after 1869, when the railroad got to Utah. Is there any? I don’t know. If there’s a history of the building of the temple from an engineer’s viewpoint, that would probably answer all of my questions!

    Second, I zoomed in on that drawing titled “Transverse Section.” It’s a bit hard to figure out what the draftsman intended to show in this drawing, but I don’t see anything that shouts out “steel.” It does appear, though, that the large beams are in two pieces, supported where they meet in the middle by the large pillar–colored brown above the second level. (In fact, the underside of the left portion of the lower beam, colored dark gray, appears to show the unevenness that one would expect when using large timbers for framing. When the trunk of the tree had a minor curve in it, the “high” side would be planed so the floor would be flat, and the curvature on the underside would be left as is.)

    Third, if one were framing a large floor such as the temple’s in 2016 (and not pouring a concrete floor), one would likely begin with steel beams about 12′ to 16′ apart, crossing the building’s shorter dimension. Then floor joists would be set between those beams, every 12″, and then the subfloor laid on and nailed to those joists. It appears that the Transverse Section shows a similar construction. The long rows of “cross-hatching” along the beams appear in fact to be views of the ends of the floor joists (probably 2″ x 12″) that would have been laid to fill in the floor between the beams, and the X-shaped pieces are “bridging” that would have been installed every 6′ or so to prevent the joists from twisting. Some evening after some serious New York barbecue remind me to tell you my most memorable story about nailing bridging–I’m pleased to report that after four decades the scar is no longer visible.

    Finally (and this is the last I’ll write until we find some source to answer all these questions), my questions are clearly based upon my experience with 20th century building techniques. I’ve never built anything that used stone as a structural material, and, in particular, nothing that had walls six feet thick at the top. Such walls would have stability standing alone that no modern wall could ever have. (Nobody could afford to make walls that thick!) It would have taken a serious earthquake to topple those walls, and a couple of floors tying the walls together probably wouldn’t have done much to save them. Still, I wonder about the lack of scaffolding–had it just been removed by the time that photograph was taken, or was there scaffolding on the inside–and about the challenge of getting men and materials up to where they were needed if there were neither scaffolding nor interior floors. But I’ll try to get rid of my “presentism” and get back to a 19th century frame of mind.

23. There are a number — maybe a half dozen — photos taken from about the same position as this one at various times in the 1870s and 1880s. They can’t be dated exactly, but they can be sequenced by the height of the walls. I don’t think I’ve seen any exterior scaffolding at all until they get to the towers. I’ll scout up those pictures and post them.

    One thing that intrigues me is those derricks. There seem to be a couple on the ground this side of the temple, but most appear to be inside the temple walls themselves, although I suppose they could be outside on the far side. If they’re on the ground on the far side, they are very, very tall, much taller than the ones on this side. If they are inside the temple walls, then what are they standing on? The ground at basement level, which would require them to be even taller? On those floors we’re wondering about? Or what?

24. I’ve been following this conversation with interest, although I’ve not had much to add.

    The derricks were originally outside the walls, as they were horse powered, and the teams needed to have room to pull–quite a ways with the bock and tackles rigged for extra advantage–get turned around etc. By the time of this photo, the derricks were steam powered, but I doubt they’d move steam engines into the temple because (1) the removal would be difficult (2) coal smoke staining the interior stone (3) the outside derricks were still in place.

    During the era of the SL Temple construction, steel framing was unheard of, due to cost. Cast iron, though, was available and widely used (the ZCMI storefront is one obvious example).

    The temple may not have had scaffolding. The cathedrals didn’t (or the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge), just a ladder or stairways for workers to climb up to wherever high the walls had reached, which in the case of bridge towers,was sometimes built into the wall. Just set a couple planks across the tops of the window columns, and you’re good to go. Also, no safety railings!

25. There’s a picture on wikipedia here that clearly shows all the derricks outside the walls.

    Although this earlier picture on the Church website seems to show them inside. Hmmm.

26. Fascinating, TOClark!

27. Looking at the roof section on the transverse drawing, it appears to be steel beams with plates riveted at the joints, the color matches the beams for the lower floors, and wood tends to be a yellowish color in the other drawings.

    ‘Framing details’, (right before the elevator plans) shows wooden beams inset in the stone. However, the second ‘Interior elevations’ shows what I’m going to go ahead and say is steel beams, with joists between them.

    It’s hard to say for certain what was used, and it would be a thankless and difficult task to catalog the entire history of construction. Luckily, there’s a graduate student at BYU that already did it, in 1961. Wallace Raynor’s thesis is available [[http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5061/][here]]

    Pg 184 confirms that the roof is supported by steel, and has a photocopied picture of it. Looking at the table of contents, most of the other detail seems to be focused on the stonework.

    The idea of adobe really interests me. [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibam%5D%5BThis city]] has buildings over 100 feet tall with earth construction, and [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/6/6d/20061213075614!Minaret_Al_Muhdhar_Mosque_Tarim_Yemen.jpg][This minaret]] is 175 feet high, and quite beautiful. So, the walls would have been doable, the spires would probably be taller than any other adobe building, and it could have been just as good looking. The one downside to adobe seems to be earthquakes, so it’s probably good that it wasn’t used.

28. Looking at the roof section on the transverse drawing, it appears to be steel beams with plates riveted at the joints, the color matches the beams for the lower floors, and wood tends to be a yellowish color in the other drawings.

    ‘Framing details’, (right before the elevator plans) shows wooden beams inset in the stone. However, the second ‘Interior elevations’ shows metal beams, with joists between them.

    It’s hard to say for certain what was used, and it would be a thankless and difficult task to catalog the entire history of construction. Luckily, there’s a graduate student at BYU that already did it, in 1961. Wallace Raynor’s thesis is available here

    Pg 138 has details on the derricks, and steam engine used to power them. More than I can summarize, as it changed several times. It does mention no scaffolding was needed since the walls were thick enough to allow workmen on them.
    Pg 184 confirms that the roof is supported by steel, and has a photocopied picture of it. Looking at the table of contents, most of the other detail seems to be focused on the stonework.

    The idea of adobe really interests me. This city has buildings over 100 feet tall with earth construction, and this minaret is 175 feet high, and quite beautiful. So, the walls would have been doable, the spires would probably be taller than any other adobe building, and it could have been just as good looking. The one downside to adobe seems to be earthquakes, so it’s probably good that it wasn’t used.

29. Sorry Ardis, I thought that first post didn’t go through so I kept reading the thesis and added some details that had been brought up here.

30. Anybody who is still reading is very interested and didn’t mind a bit, Seth. Thanks for all you’ve added.

31. Oh man. I think the correct word here is “facepalm.” I thought I didn’t have anything to add to the discussion, but I have a copy of the Raynor thesis on my hard drive.

    I’ve used it in my current project to help track down when and if certain former African American slaves or their children could have helped build the temple. I checked it recently for details of the building of the Tabernacle (Freighting the Tabernacle Organ … or Whoops, Did I Repeat an Urban Legend?) although I didn’t cite it there since Stuart Grow’s thesis was more useful.

    Raynor is quoted in Paul Richards’s BYU Studies article, “The Salt Lake Temple Infrastructure: Studying It Out in Their Minds,” which is a quicker and easier read than the thesis, but doesn’t address all these questions. Richards does specifically address the legend of the elevator shafts. (Not true, but like the story of the Sweetwater Crossing it has to be handled oh so diplomatically.)

    However, I’m glad the discussion went this far without reference to Raynor or Richards, because it has been much more interesting to follow this detailed exploration of the technology, and see the architectural drawings and historical photographs.

32. Wow, what an interesting, informative comment thread … except for comment 3 …

33. Ha! And except for this one.

34. Amy, that’s quite interesting. It’s the little details that make everything fit together.

    If you ever feel less diplomatically inclined, those drawings of the temple also include a proposal and blueprints from the otis elevator company.

35. After too long shoveling snow, I come back to this. One thing that raises my curiosity about the drawings that Seth linked to is that they show several different designs for the same thing. For example, the roof framing appears in something called “Roof truss drawing”–could that be for the annex roof?–as well as what appear to be seven different drawings titled “Transverse section.”

    Whether these are preliminary plans, shop drawings, as-built plans, or part of Truman Angell’s dreams of perfection, if nothing else they seem to show that things changed along the long construction period. How much is “we’re making it up as we go along” and how much “new and better materials (or techniques) are available,” I don’t know. But this has been a fascinating scratching of the surface of a subject that probably deserves additional research and a treatment more accessible than a master’s thesis buried in a dusty archive (and in Amy T’s computer’s hard drive, apparently).

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