Idaho Falls, Idaho Temple

That is kind of a clunky title, I always thought, but it’s utilitarian and it serves its purpose. Still, you’d be hard pressed to get locals to call it by its full name—Idaho Falls, Idaho Temple. Same is pretty much the case wherever you go. I never once called our nearest temple the Sacramento, California Temple. It would be weird to say the Manti, Utah Temple.

These naming conventions may seem like trivial minutiae, but it does make a difference when trying to find interior photos from the original church press releases.

Anyway. Next in my archive of interior photos and trivia is the Idaho Falls, Idaho Temple.

 

It’s very World War II-era architecture, following the more modern styles of the time. It’s another temple that uses the written word as a form of sacred decoration, with gilt letters over the marble door frame of the chapel (at least, last time I was there ... in 2014, I think). The interior architecture reminded me, actually, of an old-timey chapel from the same era, but grown into something greater (or evolved, if you will—I’m still on something of a Pokémon Go kick). There was a kind of folksy warmth that comes from having beautiful marble doorways in the same room as fuzzy walls, of the exact same kind you get in 80s/90s-era chapels.

Most striking of all, to me, were the murals that covered the walls of the Celestial Room. I have never before been in a Celestial Room with muraled walls! And though the colors of the few photos I could find seemed to fit in a muted, warmer palette, the mural is much cooler in person, with lovely blues and greens sticking out most strongly in my memory.

As for its history, this temple was designed according to the older way of using an official Church board of architects, though this board included some names from previous temple designs we looked at for Mesa, Arizona and Cardston, Alberta, like Pope and Young. Kind of like a Best Of album of recent temple architects.

World War II did slow construction significantly, the groundbreaking by David Smith (sharing a name with Joseph Smith, Jr.’s youngest son, whose story is perhaps one of the most poignant in Latter Day Saint history ... ah, I could do a whole blog post on him!) in 1939 and the dedication by George Albert Smith in 1945,

The aforementioned Celestial Room, with murals

 The Celestial Room is one of the few I could find decent-sized/quality images of. This particular one, I believe, is from the more recent pamphlet the Church published about temples, which included photos of Idaho Falls, Vernal Utah, San Diego California, Salt Lake, and other temples.

The rest, I’m sad to say, are more of the small, low-quality images of the past. If anyone has better quality ones, please let me know!

Creation Room

 This Creation Room is notable, to me anyway, because it’s one of the few that uses anything like practical special effects as part of the Endowment ceremony, with small, blue lights set into the ceiling that look like stars. It’s a very pretty effect.

Garden Room

Also Garden Room?

World Room

Baptistry

Evidently another view of the Garden Room

As of this writing, the Idaho Falls temple is undergoing renovation, so I don’t know what (if anything) described here will change. I haven’t heard anything about gutting or redesigning, but it is a lengthy renovation so some improvements may be noted.

Cardston, Alberta Temple

I have returned from my lengthy hiatus!

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1102285

At this time, to many locals, the Cardston, Alberta Temple is probably better known as a fairly high-ranked Pokémon Go gym, which might be the only original contribution I would be making to the established readily-available info about this temple.

For a lot of the temples that I’ll be writing about, it will quickly become apparent that I have an intimate knowledge of perhaps a handful of them, and this is no exception.

Still, there are some interesting facts I could highlight:

(1) This temple actually preceded the Mesa Arizona Temple I wrote about in my previous post, so yeah, it’s out of order.

(2) This temple may have had the longest open house of any constructed by the LDS Church after the succession crisis—approximately two years. Apparently it took a long time to finish the interior! Then again, there was a war on (the second World War, to be precise), and times were hard.

(3) This is another in the “Solomon’s Temple” style of LDS temples, and I’m fairly sure that Mesa was the last. Arguably, the upcoming Paris France Temple is a revival of this style:

Copyright Intellectual Reserve 

I enjoy the uniqueness of this sort of design: it’s broad rather than tall, and seems to carry a sort of strength in stone, a heaviness that suggests the weight of how seriously the Canadian Saints took this project. Of course, the Cardston temple design was the first to be put up to prominent LDS architects, and the design we see today was Pope and Burton’s. They were heavily influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, and it shows!

I have had a great deal of trouble finding interior photos of this temple, but here are some of the meager fruits of my labors:

The chapel with some very helpful info ... presumably from an old Ensign

Baptistry

Mural detail: John the Baptist and Christ

Another view of the baptistry

Baptistry Oxen

Mural: Abraham Offering Sacrifice

These photos were all scans—old scans by the look of them—from an Ensign article. If anyone can tell me what year/month it was, please let me know! Because then I could find it and, you know, do my own scans. So, yes, again the quality is going to be kind of poor.

For the ordinance rooms, since I’ve already explained the purpose of the five rooms in previous posts for the benefit of my non-LDS friends, I’ll just post the images (again, small as they are!) below.

Creation Room

Garden Room

World Room

Another view of the Garden Room

It seems the curtain is drawn and we see the path on the other side that the temple patrons would take as they exited the room. That is pretty awesome—a rare view of a hallway. I guess that’s a pretty good measure of my personality. I get excited by random hallways as long as they aren’t photographed very often.

Another view of the Garden Room, this time with the curtain closed

A glimpse of the Terrestrial Room

Celestial Room

I am sad that all I have is this tiny, tiny image to convey the awesomeness of this very unique celestial room. What immediately strikes me is the dark wood. Normally, the visual rhetoric of the temple is that as you progress through the Endowment, the room becomes lighter by degrees, symbolic of incrementally approaching the Kingdom of Heaven. But here we emerge into a dark-wood Celestial Room. I like the subversion of the norm here. Perhaps because it’s so unexpected, it makes me stop and ponder in a different way.

A much better image of the Celestial Room, but sadly only one wall of it

A Sealing Room

The dark wood is carried over into the Sealing Rooms, which are often furnished similarly to the Celestial Room in other temples. Just reinforcing to me that the dark wood was no mistake.

Note, again, how very modern and daring this new temple design was. I already linked to the Unity Church designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but I’ll include it in here directly to make a visual comparison.

Temple stonework detail

The temple in its entirety

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Church in Chicago, Illinois

The similarities are quite striking, and to be so boldly modern with a temple, a structure whose architecture had previously been quite conservative, was a major step that paved the way for some of the temples we’ll be looking at in future posts.

Until then, I’d better charge my phone. I have to go challenge Red Team at the Jordan River Temple Gym.