Latter-day Saint Temple Baptismal Font Staircases

This is another post on staircases in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Temples.  Today I'll be briefly discussing baptismal font stairs.

Above from left to right are pictures of the baptismal font stairs in the Nauvoo Illinois Temple, St. George Utah Temple, Logan Utah Temple (original), Salt Lake Temple, Laie Hawaii Temple, and the Cardston Alberta Canada Temple.  These staircases are typical of many temple stairs where one walks up to the font.  Many have beautiful decorative railings.  I like these staircases.  I really like the intricate railing and step details used in the St. George Temple, Logan Temple and Salt Lake Temple.  I also like that patrons get to use the stairs.

There are many temples with stairs around the font which only lead to the area around the oxen and which are only used for maintenance and cleaning.  These can be seen in the Jordan River Utah Temple, Ogden Utah Temple (at least before remodeling started), Provo Utah Temple, remodeled Logan Utah Temple, and many others.  Most of these are really plain, but one stands out.  The Washington D.C. Temple font has two curved staircases that have obviously been planned to work with the look of the font and I think they add a lot to the temple and enhance the baptistry.

Washington D.C. Temple Baptistry

Those are a few baptistry staircases.

Celestial Room Staircases

Here is another installment on staircases in temples built by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  This time I'll be discussing celestial room staircases.

In the celestial glory there are three heavens or degrees;

And in order to obtain the highest, a man must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage];

Doctrine and Covenants 131:1-2

Putting a staircase in the celestial room in a temple is such a great way to visually remind us of this principle.  I've only seen a few such staircases.  The most interesting ones are grand staircases leading to upper levels in a celestial room.  I only know of two.  Here are pictures of them:

San Diego California Temple Celestial Room

Portland Oregon Temple Celestial Room Staircase

I've never been in the San Diego Temple, but I love all the pictures I've seen of it.  I like the balcony level and the interesting curves, particularly in the railing.  I have been inside the Portland Oregon Temple once and it has a very classy, sleek, modern, luxurious look and feel.  I like how the staircase uses glass (with an etched pattern).  This keeps the room bright and light.  The brilliant white stone also is stunning on the staircase.  You enter the celestial room by walking under the middle of the staircase.  You can enter the staircase on either side and they meet in the middle. The staircase leads to a mezzanine level with additional seating.  This level has a door leading to sealing rooms and the "chapel" which is essentially an assembly hall.

Other temples have less grand, but still really nice celestial room staircases.  Below are staircases in the St. George Utah Temple and Salt Lake Temple.  Each leads to a sealing room.  The Salt Lake Temple staircase has a statue of Cupid as a symbol of love on the bottom post.

St George Utah Temple (left) and Salt Lake Temple (right) Celestial Room Stairs

There are other celestial room staircases that are essentially just exits, or sometimes small entrances to the rooms.  These can be seen in the original Logan Temple, the Manti Temple, London England Temple, Bern Switzerland Temple, and probably a few others.

Manti Utah Temple Celestial Room

 Those are the celestial room staircases that I am aware of.  Please comment and tell us about others I don't know about.  I really love celestial room staircases.  I wish there were more like San Diego and Portland which have the best ones, or even just ones like the St. George and Salt Lake temples have.  Hopefully as more and more temples are built, staircases will be included in celestial rooms once again.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - Temple Grand Staircases

This is another installment in my Temple staircase series of posts.  Today I want to show some grand staircases in temples built by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I'll start with the Salt Lake Temple where the endowment ceremony uses the grand staircase well.  You see it before entering the creation room.  When you leave the garden room you step onto the staircase, already a few steps up it on a small landing.  This emphasizes our choice in this fallen world, to ascend, or to fall further.  You then go up the staircase and get a brief view of the celestial room doors before turning and entering the world room.  The staircase itself is nicely built with fine woodwork.  Unfortunately, you can see from the three pictures below that at some point they have painted over the fine woodwork of the posts and part of the rail.  This is a shame as it was really fine handcrafted pioneer woodwork.  You paint cheap wood to make it look good.  You should never paint fine woodwork as it makes it cheaper.  Hopefully at some point someone will have the presence of mind to have the paint stripped off and the original beautiful wood restored.

The next grand staircase is found in the Mesa Arizona Temple where the endowment rooms were built with the staircase in mind so you climb it during the ceremony.  As you can see in the picture, the celestial room doors are at the top with the scripture "The Glory of God is Intelligence" written above them.  There is also a large mural of Joseph Smith preaching to the Lamanites (Native Americans in this case).  I also notice the fine stone or tile lining the sides of the staircase.

The Hamilton New Zealand Temple (below left) and Kyiv Ukraine Temple (below right) have similar main staircases seen in the picture below.  A similar staircase is in the London England Temple and I would guess the Bern Switzerland Temple as well.  I really like how the Kyiv Ukraine Temple staircase brings you close to the fine stained glass windows and particularly the interesting elliptical windows.

The new Oquirrh Mountain Utah Temple contains a double grand staircase in its center seen below.  The staircase has fine custom made brass railings and a stunning chandelier.  Light from both the celestial room and the chapel is carried into the heart of the temple where the staircase sits through glass walls.  Several temples use the same floor plan as this temple.  I've been to both the Boston Massachusetts Temple and the Preston England Temple and each has a single grand staircase in its center.  I recall Preston going up, reaching a certain level, and then splitting into two staircases perpendicular to the first (although it has been almost a decade since I was there last).  The Boston Temple is a very similar temple.  In Boston, the staircase starts as two curved staircases that meet midway up and continue as a single staircase.  In plan it would resemble a wishbone.  If you don't go on the staircase you can instead walk between the two and go to other parts of the temple.

The San Diego California Temple features a large, open-center, spiral grand staircase that can be seen below.  It occupies one of the towers and provides a great view up into the tower and good views of the art glass windows.

A lot of the newer small style temples include grand staircases.  Below from left to right are pictures of the staircases in the Curitiba Brazil Temple, Vancouver B.C. Canada Temple, and Panama City Panama Temple.  A similar staircase is found in the Twin Falls Idaho Temple.  I like the shape and general look of these staircases and am glad that even these very small temples can have nice grand staircases.

I'm sure there are other grand staircases in temples.  Please comment and tell us about them.  I learned at one point that grand staircases, particularly interesting ones such as spirals, were used in buildings to show the skill of those that built them and to make a place special.  Sure, a simple, ordinary staircase would have got people between floors, but a grand staircase, especially a complex one, said that the place was special enough to spend the money, time, and skill necessary to build such a staircase.  The House of the Lord is a special place and one way we can make it holy and honored and special for HIM is by including grand staircases.

Exterior Temple Staircases

This is another installment on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Temple staircases.  This time I'm focusing on exterior temple staircases.

There are a lot of simple exterior staircases.  The Kirtland Temple had a few steps leading to each door.  The Nauvoo Temple was built with a more grand entry with a large set of front steps.

Three of the pioneer temples included exterior staircases.  Here are the stairs leading to the front doors in the St. George Utah Temple, Manti Utah Temple (only the east doors), and Salt Lake Temple.   I like the grand scale of these staircases.  Visually, they make the temple seem like a higher place.  In fact, these doors were for the most part planned to only be rarely used (there are separate entrances to the temples) so the staircases really were mainly to give an elevated architectural look.  The Manti Temple also used to have a grand staircase going all the way up the hill to the west entrance (which was the main entrance until the 1980s).  The staircase was impressive.  It was added some years after the temple was completed, and has since been removed.  I think that is a shame as it greatly enhanced the temple's west side.  I think they should re build it.  There is another exterior staircase at the Manti Temple.  This one is on the large crenellated retaining wall (that is used in the Manti pageant for Samuel the Lamanite's speach).  I really like the uniqueness of the staircase.  It leads up to the east entry, which leads into the assembly hall of the temple.

Now I'm just going to hit on a few exterior stairs of note.  The London England Temple has some modest stairs.  I'm sure the Oakland California Temple has some stairs to get up to the rooftop gardens, but I haven't seen them.  The Mexico City Temple includes some nice tall staircases.  The Cochabamba Bolivia Temple has a nice grand front staircase.  The Santo Domingo Dominican Republic Temple has a front staircase.  The Redlands California Temple has a nice staircase that I like.  Of course the Copenhagen Denmark Temple has front steps reminiscent of the Nauvoo Temple that were part of the original church the temple was made out of.  The San Antonio Texas Temple includes an impressive set of stairs going by a fountain and leading to the front door.  The Newport Beach California Temple has a front staircase.  The Sacramento California Temple also includes fine stairs on its grounds.  A long staircase leads to the Helsinki Finland Temple.

Of course there are many others that I haven't mentioned.  Please comment and tell us about exterior stairs that you like.

Temple Spiral Staircases

When The Tolmans suggested that I write a post on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' temple staircases, I don't think they considered how broad of a topic that really is.  There are internal and external staircases.  There are multiple configurations of staircases.  I've been organizing what to write on staircases for the last week or two and have decided that the topic will require multiple posts.  I'm going to start with spiral staircases.

Spiral staircases are perhaps the most impressive type of staircase.  They require great skill to build.  Their form has a special grace that makes them among the most attractive staircases around.  The Kirtland Ohio Temple staircases are curved, although I don't think you would consider them full spiral staircases.  Here are some examples of temples with proper spiral staircases:

The Nauvoo Illinois Temple (original and rebuilt) has spiral staircases without central supports, similar to those in the Manti Temple.  I was told that in the rebuilt Nauvoo Temple the staircases are not free standing because they couldn't figure out how to make them work.  It is much more likely that the engineers decided not to make them free standing for other reasons and decided this was fine because they still look the same.

 

When I visited the Nauvoo Temple, the workers told us that President Hinckley asked the nearby Shaker community (it may have been the Mennonites) to do the woodwork for the temple including these very nice hardwood railings.  If you don't know, the Shakers (and Mennonites) are famous for their craftsmanship.  The Shaker congregation was invited to tour the completed temple before its dedication.  This is a great example of including other faiths and getting along with others as Christ would have us do. The rebuilt Nauvoo Temple does not include spiral staircases in all four towers.  Apparently the current building codes would only allow a few to be spiral.  They have wisely chosen to have a spiral staircase  lead to the dressing rooms and the baptistery so that all patrons will get to see the staircases.

Another spiral staircase is found in the Nauvoo Temple bell tower seen here.

The St George Utah Temple was the next built and it has spiral staircases in the corners.  I haven't found a photo of them yet; however, I asked to see them the last time I visited the St. George Temple and they showed them to me.  I recall that they had central supports.  I also noticed that they don't air condition the staircases - they were really warm.

The Logan Utah Temple was built next and it has spiral staircases in the four corner towers.  I think they are still there in the remodeled temple, although I have never seen them and do not know if they will show them to you.  The pictures to the left show these staircases.  The first shows them looking up from the assembly hall level.  They are free standing from this level up.  The next photo shows a view looking down and the last shows a view walking down the stairs.  

 

When the Logan Temple was being remodeled they wanted to run conduits through the center supports of the spiral staircases.  When they tried this they discovered that the central supports are solid stone.

The Logan Temple has had several fires over the years.  A fire in 1917 destroyed a spiral staircase that used to be in the middle of the temple (led from the celestial room back to the first floor) and it was replaced with an orthogonal staircase, which has since been demolished completely when the temple was gutted.

The Manti Utah Temple was built next and has some of the most unique spiral staircases in the world.  In the two west corner towers there are freestanding spiral staircases without central supports.  If you attend this temple, ask a worker to see the staircases and they will take you to see them.  They have incredible craftsmanship.  When they restored the temple for the centennial they found something like 2 creaks in the one staircase and none in the other, despite being heavily used by temple workers and used by patrons to access several sealing rooms in the towers.  The seams between pieces of wood on the railings are also extremely difficult to find.

 

I said that these were some of the most unique staircases in the world.  That is because there are only a few free standing spiral staircases that lack central supports in the world.  I believe there are only eight in the U.S. with two being in the Supreme Court Building (those are elliptical).  So the Manti Temple spiral staircases are really special.

One of the staircases goes up clockwise and the other counterclockwise.  They really are an impressive sight and a great asset of the Manti Temple.

The Salt Lake Temple was built next and it includes eight spiral staircases.  All have central supports.  The four corner towers have solid granite staircases.  These have a nice dark wood wainscot.  I have only seen these towers from the baptistery level.  There they have actually installed restrooms on the staircase (weirdly shaped and tight, but interesting).

The other four spiral staircases are found in the priesthood assembly hall.  Here, four spiral staircases provide access to the balcony seating.  These show fine woodwork. and wonderful carpenters' skills.  I hope to see them some day.

The next temple to include spiral staircases, that I am aware of, is the San Diego California Temple built in 1993.  It includes a very modern spiral staircase.  As you can see, the staircase has exquisite woodwork.  It is also very open, which is important as it allows all the light coming through the art glass windows to permeate the temple.

Looking up from this staircase you get this wonderful view.

The last spiral staircase that I know of in a Latter-day Saint temple is found in the newly built Copenhagen Denmark Temple.  This temple was remodeled from an existing church that was gutted, so there is a chance that the staircase was part of the original church.  If not, I am glad to see the church go out of its was to include a spiral staircase.  This staircase is also not centrally supported, making it even nicer.  I love how the light floods into the temple from a well placed skylight.

Those are the spiral staircases I know of in Latter-day Saint Temples.  If you know of others please comment.  Also, If you have a photo of the St. George Temple spiral staircases please let me know.  I would love to have one.  Please comment and let us know what you think about these staircases.  In the future I will post about other temple staircases.  There is a lot more variety in them than you may realize.