I Love To See The Temple . . .

Visualize the temples in ways you have never been able to before. Each of these infographics provides a unique way of comparing the temples. They will be updated periodically.

Page last updated 10 January 2022.

Alphabetically

The first of the infographic series displays the temples in a classic alphabetical order. Due to the difficulty in adding temples mid-row as new temples are announced, this infographic is less likely to get updated on a regular basis

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Last Updated 8 January 2022

Chronologically

This is the infographic that replaces the one that this page used to be home to. It is a basic and clean timeline of temples, to scale, in order of original dedication date.

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Last Updated 10 January 2022

Shortest To Tallest

This will not be an easy infographic to update. I will have to rearrange multiple rows any time a single temple is added. As such, expect infrequent updates!

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Last Updated 26 January 2022

Smallest To Largest

Like the one before, this will not be an easy infographic to update. I will have to rearrange multiple rows any time a single temple is added. As such, expect infrequent updates!

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Last Updated 2 February 2024

74 replies on “I Love To See The Temple . . .”

  • I love what you do. I have been asked to put together a monthly fireside for the adults in my stake. Would you be interested and available to speak and present to us sometime?

    Jim Jenkins

  • There is some confusion on when the groundbreaking and announcement was made for the Far West temple.

    History of the Church Volume 2 page 496 reads that on July 3, 1837. About 1,500 Saints assembled at the site. After prayer, singing, and address they proceeded to break ground for the Lord’s house. As written by WW Phelps. This event could have been presided over by David Whitmer president of the Clay-Caldwell stake before he feel away and was cut off from the church in later half of 1837.

    The Far West temple was announced on April 26, 1838 as found in DC section 115:7-16. Verse ten reads “And let the beginning be made on the fourth day of July next; and from that time forth let my people labor diligently to build a house unto my name”.

    As found in History of the Church Volume 3 page 41-42 and date recorded on “July 4, 1838” by Joseph Smith. The day was spent in celebrating the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
    Also the laying of the four chief corner stones for the temple.

    The saints began to settle in Far West, Missouri in 1837. But there was no ground breaking or site dedication for this temple. That didn’t start until the groundbreaking and site dedication of the Salt Lake Temple on February 14, 1853. Nor could I find anything that states that Brigham Young dedicated the Far West temple site July 4, 1838

    All the saints did was dig out the foundation for the Far West temple in July 1837. It wasn’t officially announced until April 26, 1838 and construction actually didn’t begin until July 4, 1838 with the laying and dedication of the four chief cornerstones.

    • Excellent Summary, thank you! I use the term groundbreaking because it is more consistent than changing up the term for every temple to Commencement, Site dedication, or other such terms.

  • You mention that the Mesa Arizona Temple, the Idaho Falls temple, and the Bern Switzerland temple share the same rededication date July 12, 1962 with the Cardston Alberta temple. The Stockholm Sweden temple was never rededicated.

    • This was the first revision I did this morning. Apparently I have had some bad saves in my revision history. I think I have them all fixed now…

      • Good, you caught the errors I noticed- except one: you still have the same dates listed for Orlando and Bountiful. It’s very interesting to see the relative size differences with the temples side by side. Thank you!

  • You have the Manhattan New York Temple and the San Antonio Texas Temple marked as the Copenhagen Denmark Temple.

  • Brian Olson,

    I love the 2017 LDS Temple Info Graphic that you’ve put together. It’s beautiful and really well done. I’m amazed at your talent. I found a couple of errors that you’ll want to fix. Here they are:

    1.) You have the Mesa Arizona Temple and the Idaho Falls Idaho Temple marked as the Cardston Alberta Temple
    2.) It should be “Bismarck” North Dakota not “Bismark” North Dakota
    3.) It should be “Cochabamba” Bolivia not “Cochobamba” Bolivia
    4.) You have the Perth Australia Temple marked as the Montevideo Uruguay Temple
    5.) You have the Helsinki Finland Temple marked as the Sacramento California Temple
    6.) You have the Twin Falls Idaho Temple marked as the Panama City Panama Temple
    7.) It should be Cebu City “Philippines” not Cebu City “Phillipines”

  • In the 2017 version (in the full size version, at least), the Stockholm Sweden Temple is mislabeled as the Sacramento California Temple, right next to the Sacramento Temple.

    • The Stockholm Sweden temple is correctly labeled as the Stockholm Sweden temple down in it’s place with the other 6 spire temples. I did find, however, that the Helsinki Finland temple is mistakenly labeled as the Sacramento California temple. I have got it corrected, and sometime in the next hour will have all the corrections made to the various sizes and formats and everything re-uploaded.

    • That depends on what source you are looking from. Personally, I measured using map tools from multiple sources. Salt Lake, I measured from the Footing of the tallest towers And got just over 188 feet. I make many typos, this is a complicated file to keep in order, and I left off the “1” in “188”:

      Saint George has a very large attached annex that I included in my measurements. I measured from the east most stairwell to the west most edge of the annex. The measurement I took for this one is different, I do need to redo Saint George more logically. It should be about 235*294, not 249*282

  • Love your work!!! Grateful for the time you put in to make these!! SO AWESOME!!! & thanks so much for your model of the Las Vegas Temple. Looking forward to the Info graphic coming for 2015!! Will it be in December do you know?

    • I don’t know if it will be finished this month or next. I can say there is a good chance that next years will probably be up to date!

  • Thank you so much for sharing this. It is amazing. The Grandchildren are going to love it too.

  • sera dificil fazer os templos de manti, logan? você focaliza mais em que tipo? precisa de fotos para fazer os modelos?
    parabens pelo belo trabalho.

    • Obrigado! Manti e Logan vai ser difícil de fazer por causa dos detalhes sobre o Templo. Eu tenho muitas fotos de ambos os templos, ele só vai ter um monte de tempo para fazê-los.

      Thank You! Manti and Logan will be difficult to make because of the Details on the Temple. I have plenty of photos of both temples, it will just take a lot of time to make them.

  • Great site, but I was really surprised not to see San Diego, one of the most beautiful and unique temple I’ve ever seen.

    • Jake, as I commented just below the infographic, if it’s not in there, it’s because I have not made a model of it yet. I know everyone wants to see “Their” Temple in the graphic, but I can only make about 1 temple model per week. (These are not flat 2D models, though for the graphic they have been rendered that way.) I started this seriously just a little over 2 years ago, and have only completed 90 models (Mostly small temples.) I will get the others done, eventually, but it will take time.

      In an odd related not, I was actually working on San Diego at the time you made this comment. There is a significant amount of detail to replicate for San Diego, it will be 3 weeks before it appears on the site at a minimum, but It should appear in this December’s version of the InfoGraphic.

      • Hey, no problem. I was just curious about how/why you decide which temples to do, and in what order. I assumed (hoped?) San Diego would be one of the first twenty or so, merely because of its uniqueness — though maybe that makes it harder to do?

        Either way, keep up the good work!

        • Nah, not that simple. At first I was only going to do pending temples, ones under construction, as a guess to what they were going to look like. But I had already done 80 temples for Google Earth, that were a simpler quality, and I found I could convert those to high quality fairly simply, so those are the ones I had been working on next. The ones I did for Google Earth were done using some tools that Google created for the purpose, and depended upon where they had multi-angle Ariel photography. At the time, the multi-Angle Aerial photography did not cover the portion of San Diego that the temple was in, so I never did San Diego. Google Closed the tool down a while back, but before they did, I went through and made simple models of any temple they had the photography for (It updated over time) and San Diego was one of them. So It’s getting done now.

      • The comment about San Diego not being included was for last year’s (2013) info graphic. The 2014 infographic does indeed include San Diego!

    • Only because I had not made models of any of them when I made the infographic. Making the models is a long process. I am currently working on a model for Manaus, and another for Curitiba, so they will be in this December’s infographic!

  • Great work on the info graphic! ? One small suggestion for your next version… adding in a temple from down under in Australia. Outside of USA we have the most temples in a county… though not as exciting to look as Nauvoo, San Diego, Manti, Vegas etc

    • Chris, Thank you, I enjoy doing this! Technically I am already representing Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne in the small temple sections, as the temple I’ve placed looks rather identical to the ones they are standing in for. The infographic would become to big if I put in all the small temples.

      While Australia does have a lot of Temples, having 5, Canada has 8 (+1 under construction,) Mexico has 12 (+1 under construction,) and Brazil has 6 (+2 under construction!)

    • Portland and Las Vegas both share a floor plan, but it is a modified version from the 12 listed For example, the entryway is on the side instead of on the end, and both those temples have an assembly room on an upper floor, whereas the other 12 have neither. Consequently, when I model them, they will share their own spot.

  • One of the best infographics I’ve ever encountered — really fantastic. Thank you for the countless hours of work, maybe somebody can lend you server resources for speeding up rendering.

    • Well, then I would have to speed up the modeling process! Right now Modeling and rendering are about evenly matched, mainly because of the high detail I have been putting into models lately. That said, watch for an update to this infographic later this year, possibly this month!

  • Can you do Oquirrh Mountain soon? I forwarded this link to my whole ward (I do a weekly temple email for my calling), and we would love to see it. In fact, our ward is right behind the Temple, so it would be cool if you actually showed some of the houses to the west!

    • I will eventually be doing Oquirrh Mountain temple. It is currently on the half-done list. My workflow is complicated, but in short, here is how it works:

      First: I model the grounds, then I model the temple. This can take 3 days – 2 weeks, depending on complexity. Then I add the trees and camera movement.

      Second:, I send the work over to my render computer to render. Unfortunately, This is where everything bottlenecks. I have a very good computer, but rendering still takes between a week and 3 weeks for each model. Currently, I have 5 models waiting to be rendered, so even if I finished Oquirrh today, (Which I won’t unfortunately,) it still would not be ready for a couple of months.

  • This is awesome! I really appreciate the details about your design process. I assume you make the height adjustments in Blender? Do you line them all up and render at once, or does the line-up happen afterward in Photoshop?

    I’m also interested in the motivation behind the stories you tell here – is there a reason the visual focus is on relative temple size (versus, for example, the time between different designs, or how many temples use the same designs? You tell some of these stories with the text, but the main visual focus seems to be on height)?

    A little background: I’m a CS student at the U of U studying data visualization – I’m particularly interested in how graphic designers and work with data, especially when the data gets big, complicated, or misbehaves. You’ve clearly done a TON of research and data collection and encountered both of these problems. Is there anything you find yourself doing over and over again that you wish were more streamlined?

    • I am flattered you think my work good enough to be taking into consideration.An I am sorry I did not notice this sooner, I could have answered last night.

      First: Height

      I scale them to width and height in Blender first. I render them out orthographically (No perspective) which has the advantage of making them the same height regardless of how far away they are from the camera.

      I render them singly, one at a time, saving them as .png files with a transparent background. Then I space them in a way that is, I kid you not, visually appealing. I have no strategy for how much overlap to give them, other than to give them some.

      Second: Theme

      I have always been more interested in the architecture of the temples than anything else. Especially more recently, as a single floorplan will get used multiple times before it is set aside. Even with this re-use of interior layout, the exterior can be vastly different. Payson and Gilbert (Both near the end of the infographic) are excellent examples of this.

      Because of this, A physical comparison of the building made more sense to me, and will be the driving force for the next version. There are also other advantages to doing it this way. If I laid them out linearly by time, say an inch a year, well, first it would have to be 200 inches wide. It possibly already is, or soon will be, but beyond being long, it would have significant problems starting at the inch representing about 1997. There would be so little room between temples, you would not see the individual buildings. If I spread them out to compensate for the crowding at the latter end, then you have significant gaps between the early temples. Vast amounts of empty space.

      You could scale the space, so an inch represents a year at the beginning, but 10 inches is a year for the 1990’s, but then you lose all sense of the scale of time through constant dilation and expansion. The end result is that you would end up with the temples overlapping slightly like they do here.

      Third: Other Data
      As for cataloging different designs, well, I can’t always prove designs are the same. For example, The statement I make about Albuquerque and Houston sharing the same floorplan is based upon three things: The relative size, The date of construction, and The exterior shape. I have no other proof. It is obvious with most of the small temples, but even among them, I count, so far, 6 different layouts. So I try to keep my conjecture to a low. I have many pairings that I think are the same, but no proof. I felt it best to stay on as firm a footing as I could, and even then, I have already identified many issues in the current document.

      Next time, I won’t be completing it in 2 weeks for a school assignment, and I will put significantly more work into my verification process.
      Reply

      • Thanks so much! This is really useful feedback! I’ve been interviewing graphic designers for a while, and honestly you have much more attention to detail and are more true to the data than most.

        We’re planning to build a tool or tools to help with exactly this kind of heavy lifting, but we’re trying to be extremely careful about not limiting design the way we engineers do. As such, we’re trying to get as many use cases together as possible. I’ll keep you posted if anything actually comes out of this or if we cite your work in a paper.

        • I can’t tell you how nice it would be to have some kind of info graphic designing software. To be able to just drop in content, tag it with pertinent data, and have the software order it accordingly, that would have saved hours. It would be nice if it had some kind of auto formatting feature for text. I kept having to re-size my text boxes to accommodate the smallest grammar fixes!

  • Thanks for an awesome graphic. Excellent design.
    Since you mentioned an updated version in the works, here are a couple things I hope are helpful:
    1) It looks like the height of the Boston Temple is 139 feet. The 83-foot figure is probably the height as originally dedicated, before the addition of the steeple. Sources: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700205706/Mitt-Romneys-speech-about-Boston-temple.html?pg=all
    http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?locale=0&sourceId=905dcb6a017cd010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&vgnextoid=7cecc8fe9c88d010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD
    2) The Ogden Temple as remodeled should be the exact same height as before the remodel.
    3) There are some minor typographical and syntax issues.
    I hope that doesn’t sound too critical or detract from how much I liked the graphic. Really, this is awesome.

    • I have been trying to resolve Boston, thank you that helps. So it’s an 83 foot steeple on top of the temple, not an 83 foot temple. Wikipedia has that wrong. They made the same mistake with Provo. They have Provo as being 118 feet tall, but I was able to find an article from LDS Church news that said it was a 175 foot temple with a 118 foot spire.

      Syntax and Typography are always changing, so I will look through that again.

      I am going to disagree with you on Ogden though. The church has now released 2 separate renders of what Ogden will look like. The first one did have the spire at precisely the same height as the original. The second one however had significant changes to the design of the spire, which now appears to be higher than the original. It’s probably only a difference of about 3 – 5 feet though, so I made my spire to high. See both renders here: http://bottomofnothing.blogspot.com/2012/03/revised-render-for-ogden-utah-temple.html and note where the Moroni sits in relation to the cloud above it. If you figure that this is either a 10 foot or 12 foot tall Moroni, that makes the height difference probably about what I said before. Like I said, it’s a tiny change and I over pushed it.

  • I was reading about your ‘problems’ modeling the Boston Temple. Could it be that some of the measurements were ‘as dedicated’ that is, without the spire, or is it measured with the spire? I seem to remember there was some heartburn from some government organization about the height or something. The temple was dedicated without the spire and then after it was approved, they added the spire later.

    • The local residents were complaining about the proposed height. A court upheld a lawsuit against the church that forced them to build Boston without the spire. That version of the temple was about 50-60 feet tall, at least according to what I have read. The Church won an appeal and obtained permission to add the spire. everything I have read says that Boston is NOW 80 some odd feet. However, the spire takes the height of the temple to twice the height of the base, which should make the overall height right now around 100 feet.

      It is turning out that I was wrong about Cardston, so I am probably wrong about Boston too!

      • Believe it or not Sen Ted Kennedy had a lot to do with the Boston Temple getting a spire. He made a comment that he could not figure out why people were upset about a church building having a steeple. He made a few other positive comments and soon the steeple was approved.

        • I believe it. He and Mitt actually worked together quite a bit over the matter. It’s nice when people can cross ideological lines to work together.

  • Very cool information. However, the Cardston Temple was not the first outside of the United States. The Laie Hawaii Temple was dedicated in 1919, about 30 years before Hawaii became part of the United States. It no longer is a foreign temple, but at the time it was.

    • A Good point, but Hawaii became a US Territory in 1898. It was part of the United States at that time even though it was not a state. Laie was however the first temple outside of the continental United States.

    • I hope to have one soon! I have a couple of renders I did before The Temple was built. They were guesses, but not too bad. Find them here.

    • In order to include them in the infographic, I have to make them first! Currently it is taking me 1 to 2 weeks to model a temple, so it may be a year or two before you see the ones you are looking for.

  • Very nice! I agree with others about changing to a darker font color for ease of reading, but the graphics and info are wonderful!

  • The dates in the very bottom line are had to read…is there a darker color you could use? Otherwise, very interesting!

  • Would be nice to name the country or state next to the name. Not everyone knows where Cardston is.

    • I had been trying to go minimalistic, but you make an excellent point. My next version I will have to remember that.

    • Not a bad idea. Cardston is in Alberta, Canada. Alberta is now the home to three Temples (Cardston, Calgary and Edmonton)

      • You are correct in your assumptions regarding the Cardston Temple height. The outside wall of the base was originally a retaining wall and the top of what is now the base was a garden that surrounded the temple, thus forming the ground level from which the height was measured. In the 1950s the area was excavated and turned into change rooms, cafeteria, laundry and offices.

        • THANK YOU! Thank you thank you thank you! I have been looking for proof of that for over a year now, seriously. Now if I could just find good images of the gardens that used to be on what is now the roof, I could move on to making my next Cardston Model, which will depict how it looked when it was dedicated. Well, I’ll be able to move on to it in 3 or 4 years, anyway!