Tabernacle is symposium topic
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Observing 140 years since the Salt Lake Tabernacle was first used, the Sons of Utah Pioneers national society devoted its annual Historical Symposium Nov. 10 to three presentations on the historic facility.
The symposium, held at the society's national headquarters in Salt Lake City, comes in the year when the Tabernacle was rededicated in April by President Gordon B. Hinckley following the most extensive refurbishment in the building's history.
Ronald W. Walker, professor of history at BYU, led off the symposium by showing a rough-cut version of a soon-to-be-released video presentation he has produced with his son, Jonathan, and Nathan Carter, in which Brother Walker appears as narrator.
He said he began about 10 years ago to study the Tabernacle, focusing on the question, "Could the Tabernacle be treated as a cultural artifact and, if so, what would it tell us about the people who built it?"
In his video narration, Brother Walker noted that the Tabernacle had roots going back to the very beginning of the Church. He said that in Nauvoo, Joseph Smith hoped to build a tabernacle just west of the rising temple. It was to be a canvas tent 250 by 125 feet. "However, his death brought an end to the project. The canvas, instead of being used for a tabernacle, became the covers for the saints' covered wagons in their trek west."
In Salt Lake City, he said, Church members built temporary structures called bowers or boweries, consisting of branches or evergreen boughs placed on poles to create a rough ceiling. For protection from the weather, the saints quickly built "the old tabernacle" until something larger and more permanent could be erected, he said.
"Though simple, the old tabernacle was a minor engineering success, particularly due to its free-standing ceiling. The boweries and the old tabernacle are evidence of a people who valued practicality over design, gathering rather than ornamentation, preaching rather than traditional architecture."
After construction was begun on the present Tabernacle, stories emerged to explain its curious design, Brother Walker said in his narration, some saying that a hard-boiled egg served at President Brigham Young's breakfast table gave inspiration for the shape of the structure.
"However," he remarked, "a building is best explained not by its lore but by its pedigree. The Mormons were a precedent-finding people, especially when it came to an idea suggested by their founding prophet, Joseph Smith. A planned-but-never-completed tabernacle at Nauvoo clearly had lingered in the mind of President Young and other Mormon leaders. The great Tabernacle in Salt Lake City therefore owed its name, shape and size to President Smith's first plans. And like those plans, the tabernacle stood just west of the sacred Mormon temple."
With no columns to obstruct the view, the new Tabernacle in form and function was a Mormon bowery, only built of more lasting material, Brother Walker said.
Roger Sears, project manager for the Tabernacle's seismic upgrade and renovation, begun in early 2005 and completed this year, showed numerous projected photos of the construction work as he gave insights into the project.
Part of the work, he said, involved reinforcing the Tabernacle's piers with new footings and micropiles. Also, the project involved installing a new steel horizontal belt truss all the way around the building to anchor it to the sandstone piers.
And new sister trusses were put across the length of the roof to reinforce the king trusses. Brother Sears said a shortcoming of the original work on the Tabernacle was that the king trusses were not any more substantial than other trusses in the roof. Installation of the sister trusses remedied that problem.
Richard Oman, manager of the arts and sites division of the Family and Church History Department, spoke of the Tabernacle as an icon to the world of the faith and history of the Latter-day Saints.
He talked of the building's remarkable acoustical properties, which experts at the symposium agreed were a fortunate but unintended consequence of the building's domed shape.
Speaking of the later addition of a balcony to the Tabernacle, Brother Oman commented, "This idea of a balcony for extra seating, it was useful for that, and it became increasingly useful as time went on. But that was not the reason they first built the balcony. The creation of the balcony started out to solve the problem of acoustics."
He pointed out that the balcony has the unique feature of being recessed from the interior wall. Reflected by the parabolic shape of the ceiling, the sound goes between the wall and the balcony and becomes trapped below the balcony, in effect boosting the sound for people seated near the walls and under the balcony, he explained.
"Now that's a pretty clever solution for acoustics," Brother Oman commented.
With typically 12,000 people seated in the Tabernacle in the early days, the building's design "was pushing acoustical science about as far as you could push it before the advent of electronically amplified sound," he remarked.
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