Features
The 1.4 million square foot (130,000 m2) Conference Center seats 21,200 people in its main auditorium. This includes the rostrum behind the pulpit facing the audience, which provides seating at general conference for 158 general authorities and general officers of the church and the 360-voice Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The auditorium is large enough to hold two Boeing 747s side by side. All seats in the audience have an unobstructed view of the pulpit because the balcony is held up by radial trusses. This construction method allows the balcony to sink 5⁄8 inches (16 mm) under full capacity. Behind the podium is a 7,667-pipe and 130-rank Schoenstein pipe organ. Underground is a parking garage that can hold 1400 cars. A modernist, three-story chandelier hangs in a skylight in the interior of the building.
External walls of the Conference Center are clad in precisely-cut quartz monzonite (a close relative of granite). A 92-foot (28 m) glass-centered spire denotes the religious purpose of the building. A 67-foot (20 m) stepped waterfall descends from the spire. The waterfall utilizes water from a natural spring found underneath the building during construction. City Creek flows in a rough-hewn riverbed, complementing the Conference Center.
Because the building sits near the base of Salt Lake City's Capitol Hill, the roof is landscaped for attractiveness. About 3 acres (12,000 m²) of grass and hundreds of trees have been planted on the roof. Twenty-one native grasses were employed to conserve water and showcase local foliage. The landscaping is meant to echo the mountains and meadows of Utah.
Read more about this topic: LDS Conference Center
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)