I just looked at the pictures of some temple in Brazil...

http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/manaus-brazil-temple-open-house-dedication-dates-announced-May-June

...and honestly, I'm not impressed. Okay, the outside looks sorta nice, I can admit that. I think a lot of them actually look sorta nice-ish on the outside. But the inside looks horrible!

White bulls!

REALLY UGLY RUGS!!!

Blue baptismal font water!! What are they, bettas? If you've ever seen a Petsmart betta fish in a cup of blue water, you know what I mean...if not, compare the baptismal font picture with this picture: http://www.bettafish.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=34679&stc=1&d=1313624285

Why are all the walls yellow-ish? It's not because they're old, obviously. Did someone piss in their white paint?

The upholstry on most of the chairs/couches looks like it came from my grandma's house after the cats peed on it (to make it that awful vaguely-yellow color that's on so many things in there).

The shade of brown wood that they use on the chairs is the color of the dump I took 45 minutes ago.

The gold looks really fake and really tacky. It doesn't help that I HATE the color gold. I've seen real gold, and the gold things in this temple look like "gold-colored" paint from the craft store.

If the other temples look like this one...HOW DOES ANYONE THINK THEY'RE BEAUTIFUL?!?!

This rant was brought to you by the 902375236578293 mormons on my facebook who won't stop sharing this stupid "news" article.

The spire always looks out of proportion to the rest of the building. A smaller version could be used as a paper spike.

The Mormons want their temples to be highly visible and very impressive looking. It's their way of saying "look at us! We're special. Don't you wish you were worthy of entering this building?" In reality many of their temples are underutilized and expensive to maintain. I wonder what they'll end up doing with them?

I agree. If these are the "houses of the Lord," then the Lord needs better architects and interior designers. The buildings for the most part are bland and uninspiring. The decor is unremarkable. The temples tend to come off looking like a nice, high-end chain businessman's hotel.

Is it me, or do the ordinance rooms look really tiny? The sealing room looks clautrophobic.

The "yellow paint' is actually a soft white that the camera picks up as yellow, probably because of yellow light bulbs reflecting off it in the yellow spectrum.
The carpets? Yep industrial.

The furniture? pale neutral colors of ecru and etc. Mirrors everywhere, but the vases??? In the Vegas temple they were dove gray in color and a boring classic style.

The large fake bouquets of flowers were okay, but did you know that just one four foot across fake flower bouquet is at least $900????? And the Vegas temple had a lot of them in the celestial living room.

The best temple I ever was in was Cardston because they had the most amazing and intricate inlaid wood trimming of every doorway and hall way. It was beautiful, but I like craftsman style homes with hardwood floors and built in shelves and beautiful hand crafted wood moldings on the doorways.

And it's true the gold look is about as real as the "marble" pillars in Caesars Palace Casino in Las Vegas. My BIC husband said of the Caesars Palace pillars, "they look like an old whore, painted to look like something she ain't."

It's true we'll probably never see a Celestial Room with deep cherry red carpet, or an amazing floral print (like an old fashioned wool carpet). Now I'd like to see a royal purple or maybe a deep teal green.... or even a mauve, but maybe that would make me thing of a bathroom....

Did you know the Logan Temple has a boot scraper built into the cement near the front door for scraping the mud off the bottoms of your soles when you came in? Of course the front door is never used anymore but the pioneers had a built in boot scraper for coming in out of the streets that were used by horses and oxen ....:D

Maybe the new temples should have built in scrapers to remove the BS when you LEAVE them...

And have you seen the rendering of the proposed Rome temple? It's impossible to overstate the tackiness in comparison with the average European cathedral--say St. Steven's in Vienna. And to compare it with St. Peter's in Rome?

Geddoudahere-ly yrs,

S

Temples are a great example of juvenile architecture, just like their music, and their doctrine.

When I first saw the renderings of the Rome Italy temple I was really disappointed. I was a TBM at the time and as a returned missionary to Italy I thought it would look very out of place.

Payson temple.

Lol

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_aEAEv9UrDhc/S32Pnu5JraI/AAAAAAAABLw/nPlOn8IPKMg/s1600/Payson_temple.JPG



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/28/2012 08:23AM by Jesus Smith.

I have seen craftsmanship. I had a friend who restored antique musical instruments, he did wood inlay and made lost-wax castings of metal parts. My brother builds classic wood sailboats that are floating jewels. Then - I go into a Michaels Arts & Craft Store. Cheap shoddy plastic crap and ugly fake flowers.

An LDS temple gives me the "Michaels Crafts" feeling.

I've always thought the one in Cardston would make a bitchin' restaurant/bar/nightclub with a Mayan/Aztec theme...and you could put a brewery in the space where the dead-dunking font is now....

The "waiting area" looks like a tacky hotel lobby.

The first "ordinance room" looks like a cross between board meeting room and a Mayan temple where they going to perform a sacrifice.

The second "ordinance room" looks like a cross between the old movie theaters that had the curtains they would pull back to show the movie (and close at the end) and the sacrificial altar again.

The "sealing room" looks like another sacrificial altar.

Mormon altars look strange compared to what I have seen in other churches. The cushion on top of all of them makes it look like someone is supposed to lay on it, which brings the thought it is a an altar on which to sacrifice someone.

The "celestial room" looks like another tacky hotel lobby.

A baptismal font on the back of oxen is just plain weird.

The brides room looks like the waiting area of a restroom in a tacky hotel.

Overall, very ugly and uninspiring architecture.

My theory is that the cushioned alters go back to the polygamy days, when some pretty kinky things were happening in the Temples that none of us will ever know about.

The new temple in Gilbert looks like a giant penis.
A giant phallic symbol erected in honor of
Joe smith,
by all the men in suits at the top
who have profited
from/carried onhis example.
How appropos....

In defense of the architects and designers that work on temples, they really do try. Every time they do a new one they present a couple ideas to the old white guys who pick one and then proceed to change things piece by piece until it looks the same as the other ones. And you should see the catalogs of fugly furniture and "art" the designers have to pick from...

Most of the temples (both exterior and interior) look like "design by committee" so I'm sure that whatever the designers wanted to do got lost in the process.

Looks cheaper than they used to. I'm not talking about style or taste but simply materials and finishing.

Then again, this a Manaus we're talking about, the absolute middle of nowhere...

The New York temple has FAKE marble pillars in the celestial room. It is all so fake. I've been in churches which have REAL marble pillars.

You must admit that fake is a step-up from fake fake or simulated, imitation, faux fake. Can't be wasting $ to get the real deal.

Fake marble?

Fake??....hmmm....seems entirely appropriate.

I always thought the inside of temples was weird and cult like.

You can only speak for yourself.

The Stockholm temple has nice lines. The Scandinavian temples in general are more interesting than the norm. I like the wide arch of the Toronto temple and the Papeete temple looks good to me at first glance.

Washington D.C. and San Diego look like Disney castles.

Cardston looks like a mausoleum. Many of the Mormon temples look like mausoleums to me.

I don't mind the older temples such as SLC. At least some care was put into their design and building, unlike the quickly slapped-up newer temples.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/28/2012 12:06PM by summer.

They aren't, and they aren't.

If the Mormon church hired an outstanding, creative architect and let him or her have free reign, the church would get a lot of long-lasting, positive publicity. Architecture buffs would go out of their way to see the building, long after it was dedicated.

I guess it's more important to church authorities that the new temples conform with their tired design ideas about what a temple should look like.

LDS temples are ugly as sin for what they represent. They are monuments to cultism, gullibility, and superstition.

I don't post very often, but had to post for this one. I grew up and live in the morridor, but was never raised mormon. When I was a young child, everytime I would pass temple square, I always thought that the Salt Lake Temple was Cinderella's castle from Disneyland.

A couple of years ago I took my then 3 year old niece to the Gateway on Trax. When she saw the temple she started to."squeal "Castle, castle;