Classic Temple Crew Sweatshirt (Provo)

Status
This building no longer stands. It closed on February 24, 2024, and was taken down rather than renovated. A replacement, the Provo Utah Rock Canyon Temple, is under construction on the same hill, set west of the original foundation where the slope is flatter. Everything below describes the 1972 building.

Location
Provo, Utah. A 17-acre site on the east bench at the mouth of Rock Canyon, overlooking the city, Utah Lake, and the length of Utah Valley. Brigham Young University bordered the grounds to the southwest, and the Provo Missionary Training Center stood across the street.

Temple Number
The 15th dedicated temple in operation. It was the sixth temple built in Utah and the first in Utah County.

Announced
August 14, 1967, by Hugh B. Brown and N. Eldon Tanner of the First Presidency, in a meeting with 28 local stake presidencies. It was the first Utah temple announced after the Salt Lake Temple was dedicated in 1893, a gap of nearly 75 years.

Groundbreaking
September 15, 1969. Hugh B. Brown broke ground and Joseph Fielding Smith dedicated the site the same day. The cornerstone was set on May 21, 1971, while the building was still going up.

Dedicated
February 9, 1972, by Joseph Fielding Smith, in two sessions. President Smith presided but asked Harold B. Lee to read the prayer he had written. More than 70,000 people attended, because the sessions were carried by closed-circuit television to the Marriott Center and four other venues on the BYU campus.

Architecture
Emil B. Fetzer, Church architect. Modern and functional. White cast stone with gold anodized aluminum grills and bronze glass panels, set as a flat round base with a single spire rising from the center. 130,825 square feet across four floors, standing 175 feet high, of which the spire accounted for 118 feet.

Ordinance Rooms
Six ordinance rooms, arranged so a new session could begin every 20 minutes, along with a celestial room, twelve sealing rooms, and a baptistry on the below-ground floor.

First Temple President
Harold Glen Clark, 1972 to 1976, with Mary Deane Peterson Gilbert Clark as matron.

• The decision came out of arithmetic. By the mid-1960s roughly 52 percent of all ordinance work in the Church was being performed in three buildings: Logan, Manti, and Salt Lake. Temples for Provo and Ogden were announced in 1967 to take the load off them.
• Fetzer designed both under a single basic plan, with efficiency, convenience, and economical construction as the stated priorities. The two buildings went up at the same time and were nearly identical until Ogden was given a new exterior in the early 2010s.
• Provo's groundbreaking came one week after Ogden's, the first time two temple groundbreakings were held in the same month.
• Several thousand people turned out on May 21, 1971, for the cornerstone ceremony, with the walls and spire already standing.

• Circulation drove the plan. Six ordinance rooms ringed a celestial room at the center of the top floor, and a corridor ran the full circle of the top two levels. Fetzer took the loop from a park in Copenhagen encircled by an elliptical roadway. Patrons moved through without crossing paths, and Church News noted it was almost impossible to get lost inside.
• The original design called for a gold-leafed angel Moroni on the gold spire. The statue was dropped before the building was finished.
• Many members read the white base as the pillar of cloud and the gold spire as the pillar of fire from Exodus. That reading did not come from the design team. Fred Baker, who worked closely with Fetzer, said flatly that "we didn't have any symbolism in mind" and that the work was focused on what happened inside the building. Church News published a correction to that effect in 2024, citing Richard Cowan.

• The building opened as simply the Provo Temple. It became the Provo Utah Temple in 1999, when the Church revised its temple naming convention.
• In May 2003, 31 years after dedication, an angel Moroni statue was placed on the spire and the spire was repainted from gold to white. That is the version most people photographed.
• In the October 2021 general conference, Russell M. Nelson announced the reconstruction of the temple following the dedication of the Orem Utah Temple. An exterior rendering of the redesign was released in November 2021, and the closure date was announced in June 2023.
• On February 20, 2024, the First Presidency announced that the rebuilt temple would carry a new name, the Provo Utah Rock Canyon Temple. The original closed four days later and demolition followed.

• For decades this was the busiest temple in the Church. In 1973, its first full year of operation, 17.7 percent of all ordinances performed worldwide were performed here.
• Richard Cowan and Justin Bray called it the "working temple." It ran as many as 50 endowment sessions a day, the first starting at 5:30 a.m. and the last ending near 11:00 p.m. In 1976 it set a record with 76,000 endowments completed in a single month.
• The public open house ran January 8 to 29, 1972, and drew 246,201 visitors. Special tours were arranged for groups with particular needs, including one for visually impaired guests, whom the temple president led through while describing the building aloud.
• Sessions in Spanish and sessions for patrons who were hearing impaired both began in 1974. Portuguese, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and others followed, and by 2022 ordinances could be received here in 82 languages.