A valiant effort on my behalf lies before you. Here I have attempted to catalog each temple based upon official square footage of the temple.
Temples in the light gray blue are placeholders, which were necessary anytime the Church had released the square footage, but not yet the render. Sometimes, this was also needed when the render had been released, but I had not yet made a model for it. Which happens with increasing frequency.
The eagle-eyed among us will notice that occasionally a temple will look small compared to its neighbors. This is often due to the temple being taller than wider, or having much under instead of above ground.
The image below, when clicked, will take you to a page featuring all my “I Love to See the Temple” series infographics. This one joins the ranks of images today, and I hope you enjoy it.
On 24 November 2022 the Church placed an Angel Moroni Statue atop the Salta Argentina Temple. This event was significant because, even though there are 55 Temples currently under construction and an additional 9 temples that have had a render released, none of them are slated to receive a Statue unless they already have it. 35 of the temples under construction don’t have completed spires yet, either, and none of them are slated to receive a statue at this point.
This ends an era. With few exceptions, every temple built in the last 40 years has had the statue.
Because of this, I have taken the opportunity to make a definitive, final version of a couple of my long-running projects.
Know Your Moroni. A Free E-Book
My e-book about the Angel Statue history and usage is finally finished. Any temple that did not have a render released at the time of publishing has been removed to simplify the book over all, though they are mentioned briefly. Articles and stories are updated, including a mention of the final statue placement.
Now, there still may be small updates for grammar, phrasing, typos and the like, but there will not be another major edition of this volume.
The Book is still rather large, so I have once a gain broken it down into 2 parts. Part one is Bios, statue info, stories and myths. Part 2 is all the charts, graphs and lists.
The biggest change this time around, however, is that I have nearly completed my efforts to put the whole book into an online readable format, for those who have no desire to download. That can be found here:
Of an even more satisfying is what will be the final major update to My Moroni Direction infographic. I’m sure there are small errors and things I have forgotten, stuff I will need to change, but for the most part, this is now done. It will not be updated as new renders are released.
Should the Church once again commence the practice of adding statues to temples, even retroactively, It will, at this point, constitute a whole new Volume of my book, rather than an update to the existing. It may mean the same thing for the infographic as well. I haven’t decided on that one yet.
Back in 2015 I released my first Ebook, a 167 page work about the Angel Moroni statues frequently used on Temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The book was inspired by a desire to see if I could identify who sculpted each of the statues then in use on the temple. After some investigation on the subject, I found that there was a lot of information on the internet, and it all basically said the same thing. I then found that it was all wrong.
I set out to correct the lack of information by writing what I thought then to be the definitive work on the subject, Know Your Moroni: A Fieldguide to Angel Moroni Statues.
A couple of years after it’s release, I learned that, while my information was better than what had come before, I still had it wrong in many spots.
So in 2018 I set out to do a small update to my book, intended to take a couple of months and result in the 2018 edition.
So here we are now in 2021. I have spent hours researching, looking up interviews, cross referencing info, losing data, finding it again, and generally re-writing the entire work from the ground up.
And after much consideration and thought,
It’s still free.
Update: Revision 3 released 11 March 2021.
In With the New
So here it is in all it’s reworked and redesigned glory. The new edition features expanded information, new artwork, and new sections.
The statue sections have now all been fully fleshed out with a history and description of not just the statue, but how it was made.
The biographies of the Sculptors have all been better researched, updated, corrected, and illustrated with examples of their other works.
The big news is that, with the help of the staff at the Church History Library, we were able to collect more accurate placement dates for most of the statues. Instead of having good information for 30-50 percent of the statues, there are firm dates for about 90 percent!
Like the Stories Section, the Myths from the previous book, now in their own chapter, have been better researched, expanded, and added to:
2015
Myth #1: All Temples must have an Angel Moroni Statue
Myth #2: All Statues Must Face East
Myth #3: All Statues Must Face Independence Missouri
Myth #4: The White to Gold Angel
Myth #5: Replaced Because of Bullet Holes
Myth #6: Angels and Airplanes
Myth #7: Moroni and Mexico City
2021
Myth #1: All Temples must have an Angel Moroni Statue
Myth #2: All Statues Must Face East
Myth #3: All Statues Face the Same Direction as the Temple’s Front Doors.
Myth #4: All Statues Must Face Independence Missouri
Myth #5: The White to Gold Angel
Myth #6: Angels and Airplanes
Myth #7: Moroni and Mexico City
Myth #8: Moroni Once Had Wings
Myth #9: Nauvoo Statue ended up on Assembly Hall
Myth #10: World’s Fair Moroni used on [Seattle] Temple
Myth #11: Angel Moroni violates the Commandment against Graven Images
Myth#12: Angel Moroni Stolen from top of Temple by Helicopter
Myth #13: Moroni always marks the completion of the Exterior/1 year out to dedication
Myth #14: Angel Statues Are Very Expensive
Myth #15: Nauvoo Temple Moroni is the only one to face west because…
Myth #16: The sign of the fallen trumpets
Myth #17: Posthumous Addition
Bonus: Myth #?: Angel Moroni Replaced Because of Bullet Holes
New Charts, Lists, and Graphs
Similarly, the Charts, Graphs and Lists section has been expanded, updated and corrected as well:
2015
Identify Your Moroni
Height Comparison
Direction
Statue by Sculptor
Timeline
2021
Identify Your Moroni
Height Comparison
Moroni Always Faces East (Except When He Doesn’t)
Statue by Model
Construction Timeline
Moroni by Sculptor
Chronological by Dedication
Chronological by Placement
On top of all the reorganized chapters, the book now has an extensive set of appendices where a large portion of my research that did not fit in well with the other chapters is included. Information on other notable statues, Brief Biographies on Assistant Sculptors, collected information on Moroni as a man and an Angel, and collected information on Angels in General can be found in the large Appendices at the back of the book.
The Downside:
Instead of being 167 pages, the book now reaches a full 600 pages total. This is in large part to the artwork, appendices, and the large section listing every temple and every known statue event for that temple (previously an alphabetical reference as to which temple had which statue.)
For this reason, in addition to being able to download the whole book as a single file,
I have created something new, something that has been a long time in the making. I hope you enjoy it! (Click the image to go to the page and find the download button!)
Today I have a poster print for you. This is a new layout for the timeline infographic. This poster print is easier to maintain than the horizontal version. It has several small corrections over the 2017 long print, and a fewe new temple layouts, one for Manti and two for Salt Lake. Hope you enjoy it!
Quick! Download or view this Temple Infographic now before the Church announces more!
This version of my info graphic contains all announced temples including Rio de Janeiro Brazil and Arequipa Peru, which were just revealed a couple of weeks ago.
All the Models
So, does this mean I am finished with all the temple models?!?!?
Ummm, no, unfortunately. Somewhere along the way as I made this over the last month, It dawned on me that with a little work I could probably include all the temples. It would require me finishing the temple model for about 30 temples. I finished about 3 of them before I realized I only actually had to finish the side facing the camera. So I HAVE finished at least 25% of every remaining temple model.
So I got that going for me.
Special Features
Over the years I have collected much information on temples, including historical data. In this version of the infographic, you will see small icon like renders man of the temples that feature changes made to the temples over time. These will include changes to the exterior or to the temple annex.
Possible Errors
Yep. There are possible errors. Each temple in this infographic has between 2 and 17 individual data-points, across 175 individual temples. One datapoint for each temple is the model, which itself has hundreds of datapoints (Height, width, length, proportion, color, trim-work, windows, doors etc.) So in all we are talking hundreds of thousands of points of data. And all maintained, input and created by one guy.
To add to that, the working file for creating this is so wide that it exceeds the ability of the jpg file format by 10,000 pixels, and when uncompressed for editing it takes up 4.5 Gb of disk space, which causes every edit to run slow.
So yeah, there are probably errors.
That said I have worked hard over a long time to minimize the errors. If you think you notice one, feel free to politely point it out to me, and I will either fix it at a future date or let you in on the data I have that caused me to do it the way I did.
It’s that time of the year again. I have added several temples to my annual info-graphic. I few more iterations of this, and it will conatain all the temples! Se it and download it through the infographic page, linked below.
