Essential Heavyweight Temple Tee

Location
Taylorsville, Utah. A 7.5-acre site at 2603 West 4700 South, on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley at the southwest corner of the Interstate 215 interchange. A Church meetinghouse and a recreational field stood there before.

Temple Number
The 192nd dedicated temple in operation. It was the twenty-first temple built in Utah and the fifth in the Salt Lake Valley, after Salt Lake in 1893, Jordan River in 1981, and Draper and Oquirrh Mountain in 2009.

Announced
October 5, 2019, by Russell M. Nelson during the women's session of general conference. The site was identified about ten weeks later, on December 11, 2019.

Groundbreaking
October 31, 2020, presided over by Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve. Local COVID-19 restrictions kept it to a small gathering of Church and community leaders.

Dedicated
June 2, 2024, by Gerrit W. Gong, in two sessions broadcast to every congregation in the temple district.

Architecture
Structural steel with stone cladding, in a style the Church calls pioneer-era Gothic. Three stories, 73,492 square feet, with a single attached octagonal tower.

Ordinance Rooms
Four instruction rooms, four sealing rooms, and one baptistry.

• The site came with a demolition attached. The meetinghouse that stood there served as the stake center for the Taylorsville Utah Valley Park Stake and had to come down before the temple could go up.
• The groundbreaking was personal for the presiding officer. Gerrit W. Gong's wife, Susan, is a Taylorsville native, and her father, Richard Lindsay, was the bishop of the congregation that built the meetinghouse the temple replaced.
• Taylorsville City had no zoning category that fit. On April 1, 2020, the city council passed three ordinances and a resolution, two of which created a new classification, Site Specific Development, Institutional, Temple, and rezoned the property out of Single Family Residential into it.
• The building grew between rendering and ribbon. The exterior rendering released in August 2020 described roughly 70,000 square feet; the finished temple came in at 73,492.

• The architect worked from local pioneer tabernacles rather than from other temples. The arches and motifs come out of the tabernacles built in the communities along the Wasatch Front, which is what "pioneer-era Gothic" is pointing at.
• The flowers in the exterior art glass are stylized versions of three plants that grow in the west valley: bird's-foot trefoil, "Red Beauty" bergenia, and broad-leaved gilia.
• The deep burgundy, lavender, and gold palette borrows from Gothic architecture but was chosen to sit inside the natural colors of the west side of the valley rather than against them.
• The quatrefoil runs from the architecture out into the site and back inside again. It sets the paving pattern in the four main plazas and appears again as decorative metalwork along the baptismal font railing.
• Interior stone is Perlatino from Italy throughout, with Crema Ella in the sealing rooms and celestial room. The art glass and decorative painting inside were designed by FFKR Architects.

• More than 265,000 people toured the temple during the public open house, which ran April 13 to May 18, 2024, excluding Sundays.
• When the site was announced, Church leaders said one reason for it was that a temple at that interchange would be a landmark for motorists on the beltway.
• The site is tight enough that nearly half the landscaping sits on top of structure rather than on ground. That meant limited soil depth and sub-grade anchors for the tree rootballs, along with drought-tolerant planting, minimal turf, and smart-controlled drip irrigation.
• At the dedication, Gong named the communities the district draws from, among them Bennion, Kearns, Magna, Midvale, Murray, Granger, Hunter, and Taylorsville, and said of them: "Many have deep roots, many are new, all are pioneers."