9 Mind-Blowing Facts About the LDS Conference Center

In just less than a week, my last blog post, “5 Reasons Mormonism is Actually Kinda Cool,” got way more pageviews than I was expecting (150+ and counting!), and a share on Facebook.

That's really cool. So, thanks, guys.

As a way of showing my gratitude, here's another! Hopefully this one will interest and amaze you even more. May I present:

9 Mind-Blowing Facts About the LDS Conference Center:

First, some background: The Conference Center is the world's largest indoor amphitheater ever constructed. Announced in 1996 by then-President of the LDS Church, Gordon Hinckley, it had an ambitious schedule for design, planning, and construction. Hinckley asked that it be ready by the first General Conference of the new millennium, in April 2000. (A General Conference, in Mormon parlance, is a biannual general meeting of the Church, where we listen to our leaders impart spiritual guidance, Church business is discussed, and announcements that affect the entire Church are made.) The new Conference Center is used to host General Conferences twice a year, as well as cultural performances and community events year-round.

A panoramic view of the main Assembly Hall of the Conference Center. (Source: Wikipedia.)

The scope of this building is tremendous – it takes up an entire 120-acre city block. On the top of the roof, there is an entire garden: three acres of grass and hundreds of trees dot sloped terraces. An honest-to-goodness river crosses the roof before descending 67 feet along the side of the building in a waterfall. In the main assembly hall, it seats 21,000. You could fit an entire Boeing 747 comfortably in there. (Wikipedia says you could fit two, but that's not sourced, so I dunno...)

So, with that in mind, here are the nine most amazing facts that I could come up with about it, in no particular order.

1. The construction team and schedule were unprecedented. Three local construction companies – Okland, Jacobsen, and Layton – submitted a joint bid, and called their joint team “Legacy Constructors.” Why? Because any one of them simply didn't have the manpower to get the job done, and they wanted to compete for the job with the national firms. When they won the bid, they only had 17 months to go from groundbreaking to substantial completion. “On any given day during the height of construction, as many as 1,000 workers were on site.” Source
2. The teleprompter is wicked cool. The custom-designed teleprompter displays words ONLY to the folks who are directly at the pulpit. I actually had a physics class from Dr. Justin Peatross, one of the guys who designed  this thing, where he described it to us. By cutting a Fresnel lens in half, he was able to use the principles of optics and light waves to  create a projector that focused the teleprompter's words exactly on the podium. Not to the left, or to the right, but right there. Someone who's even a few feet to one side of the podium won't see what the telepromptor is saying.
3. There are 116,000 total cubic yards of concrete found in the Conference Center. That's almost twice the amount used in constructing the Empire State Building, or enough to fill an entire football field to a depth of almost two stories.
4. There are over 27,000 tons of steel in the building also. That's just massive. There are no interior columns, so all the seats have an unobstructed view of the pulpit. This is done through use of massive truss beams that extend from the back of the assembly hall to it's main, “King” truss at the front. From there, the weight is taken down two massive concrete columns into the ground.
   The demand on these trusses is made even greater because there is tremendous weight on the roof from the landscaping, gardens, and river on top of the building. In some places, the roof loads surpass 500 pounds per square foot – more than five times the weight on most other roofs.
5. The King Truss is beyond big. In order to build a truss that was big enough to support the enormous loads (millions of pounds) that are weighing down on it, they couldn't find a normal piece of steel thick enough. Instead, they welded two of the largest steel shapes they could find, back-to-back, just to get it strong enough. It is 152 feet long and weighs 621 tons.

   

   Yes, this is the King Truss. And yes, those are people standing on top.

   And just think: this thing is directly above the podium where all the Mormon leaders speak twice a year. Better hope the engineers ran the calculations on that thing right!
6. The Conference Center is designed to last at least 150 years. That was a tall order, especially since Salt Lake City is right in the middle of a seismic zone. They had to go above and beyond the requirements of normal seismic building code (which is based on withstanding the largest earthquake in 75 years or so) to make sure that it could withstand the largest earthquake that would occur in 150 years.
7. Most of the actual building, including the podium, is underground. The architects couldn't go above 75 feet above ground because of local zoning restrictions. This created huge engineering challenges, because the walls had to withstand the tremendous weight of all the dirt pushing against them, trying to cave them in. Some of the walls in the deepest part of the building (the parking garage) are made of concrete up to 14 inches thick!
8. The pipe organ is a masterpiece. It is composed of 7,667 individual pipes, and was designed and built by Schoenstein & Co., the oldest and largest organ builder in the Western United States. It's so big and complex, it wasn't ready for use until three years after the Conference Center was completed. This thing is massive, and sounds absolutely beautiful in real life.
   

   

   The Conference Center organ is a true work of art.

9. The acoustics are mind-bogglingly complex, and yet beautiful. Imagine trying to build an auditorium this large and complex, with its  many and varied uses, flat walls, microphones and speakers out your eyeballs, and get anything besides endless feedback and echoes. A pretty tall order, but one that has been pulled off admirably. During Conference, you can always hear a little bit of echo, but overall the building can adapt very well to varied and seemingly contradictory acoustical demands. “Careful calculation was necessary to place loudspeakers precisely to compensate for a sound lag ... caused by the relatively slow speed of sound vibrations in air.” Source.

There you go. I love this building more every time I think about it, and I hope you've enjoyed reading this blog as much as I've enjoyed writing it. I'm always impressed and thankful for everyone reading these things. It's a joy to be able to spend a little bit of time every week sharing little-known or less-discussed aspects of my church and my faith with others, and I'm glad you guys are willing to come and read. I think I'm going to make this a regular thing, posting here every week or so.

So, I want your opinion on where to take it. Next week, would you rather read about “7 Interesting Mormon Beliefs You May Not Have Heard Of,” or “5 Things You Should Do The First Time You Attend a Mormon Worship Service”? Or, maybe you'd rather heard about something else entirely. Write a comment, and whichever idea has the most support will get it's own blog next week.