Salt Lake Assembly Hall - Design

Design

The Salt Lake Assembly Hall is a Victorian Gothic congregation hall. Rough granite walls are laid out in cruciform style making the hall's exterior look like a small gothic cathedral. Twenty-four spires mark the perimeter of the building's footprint and a tower rises from the intersection of the floor plan's apparent crucifix. The cruciform layout is complemented by Stars of David circumscribed high above each entrance. These symbolize an LDS perception that they are a re-gathering of Biblical Tribes of Israel.

However, the deceptively gothic exterior conceals a more modern interior lacking vaulted ceilings.

Although built of quartz monzonite rock from the same quarry as the Salt Lake City Temple, the Assembly Hall's unhewn exterior looks much different. The stones for the Assembly Hall were not cut as exactingly as the Temple's. This accounts for the building's dark, rough texture and the broader masonry joints between stones.

Seagull Monument sits directly in front of the building to the east.

Read more about this topic:  Salt Lake Assembly Hall

Famous quotes containing the word design:

    For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.
    Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)

    I begin with a design for a hearse.
    For Christ’s sake not black—
    nor white either—and not polished!
    Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—
    William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)