We ended our day with a tour of the Mormon’s Conference Center, completed just a little while before the 2002 Winter Olympics that were held in Salt Lake City. The Conference Center is huge! It will hold 21,000 people, covers 1,800,000 square feet and has a four acre rooftop park, complete with pine trees and waterfalls! That’s it to the right of the Temple in this picture taken from the Garden Restaurant.

The formal name of the Mormon Church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, known colloquially as the LDS.

The Church uses the Conference center semi-annually for its international meetings.

Notice that there are no columns supporting the roof. The main steel truss that holds the roof up was manufactured in europe. An interesting feature of the roof is that there are nine skylights, though they can be blacked out for meetings and performances, if required.

There’s a pipe organ here, too; it has over 7,000 pipes. We got to hear it played during our tour of the building.

From near the rostrum, I turned around and took this picture of the seating. Look up at the balcony level. Talk about stage fright – can you imagine giving a sermon to this crowd?

After visiting the main hall, we toured the rest of the building with a guide, looking at the design features (like this kaleidoscope-like skylight above the lobby) and art work (which I discussed in an earlier post).

Then we went up to the rooftop. The building is four stories tall.

Here’s a view looking northeast; that’s the Utah State Capitol in the background and one of the main hall’s skylights in the foreground. Can you believe those trees? They’re planted on the roof!

Here are a couple more photos of the roof of the Conference Center. That’s the Church Office Building in the background of the first picture, with more skylights in the foreground.

This “pasture” is on the roof!

Here’s a view of the Temple (on the right) and the John Smith Memorial Building (on the left) where we had lunch, from the roof of the Conference Center.

Our visit to Temple Square was an unexpected treat.