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The LDS Conference Center, located in Salt Lake City, Utah, is the premier meeting hall for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the "LDS Church", popularly known as the " Mormons"), and one of the largest theater-style buildings in the world. Completed in spring 2000 in time for the Church's semi-annual General Conference, the 21,000 seat Conference Center replaced the nearby Mormon Tabernacle built in 1868. The most notable function of the Conference Center is hosting the semi-annual LDS General Conference from which the center gets its name.
The 1.4 million square foot (130,000 m2) Conference Center seats 21,200 people in its main auditorium. This includes hundreds of chairs behind the pulpit facing the audience. During General Conference these are filled by General Authorities and a choir such as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. All seats have an unobstructed view of the pulpit because the balcony is held up by radial trusses. Behind the podium is an 8000-pipe organThe organ is a type of keyboard musical instrument, distinctive because the sound is not produced by a percussion action, as on a piano or celesta, or by means of vibrating strings, as on the harpsichord. Instead, pipe organs produce sound by means of flo. The conference center also has a side theater to seat 905 more as overflow or for other purposes.
External walls of the Conference Center are clad in precisely-cut graniteGranite is a common and widely-occurring group of intrusive felsic igneous rocks that form at great depths and pressures under continents. Granite consists of orthoclase and plagioclase feldspars, quartz, hornblende, biotite, muscovite and minor accessory. A 92 footA foot is a non- SI unit of distance or length. The popular belief is that original standard was the length of a man's foot. The average foot length is about 240 mm (9. 4 in) for current Europeans. About 996 of 1000 British men have a foot that is less th (28 mFor other uses of "metre" and "meter", see Metre (disambiguation). The metre is the basic unit of length in the International System of Units (SI: Systeme International d'Unites). It is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in absolute vacu) glassFor eyeglasses, see spectacles The physics definition of a glass is a uniform amorphous solid material, usually produced when a suitably viscous molten material cools very rapidly, thereby not giving enough time for a regular crystal lattice to form.-centered spire denotes the religious purpose of the building.
Because the building sits near the base of Salt Lake City's Capitol Hill, the roof is landscaped for attractiveness. About 3 acres (12,000 m²) of grass and hundreds of trees dot the roof.
Designs for the Conference Center were solicited from LDS Church architect Leland Gray in the early 1990s, apparently at Gordon B. Hinckley's request. Hinckley was then a counselor in the First Presidency, but has been president of the LDS Church since 1995. The LDS Church originally sought a 26,000-seat building no more than 75 feet (23 m) high in accord with zoning regulations for the LDS Church-owned 10 acre (40,000 m²) block immediately north of Temple Square. Hinckley publicly announced the project in the April 1996 LDS General Conference. The final plans, completed in late 1996, featured 21,200 seats in the main hall with 905 in a side theater.
Contracting for the building was done by three Salt Lake City firms: Jacobsen, Layton, and Okland construction companies which submitted a joint bid in order to compete with national firms. The companies jointly operated under the name "Legacy Constructors" after winning the contract in late 1996.
Demolition of existing LDS Church properties on the site began May 1997. Deseret Gym—a YMCA-like LDS gymnasium—and a Mormon Handicraft store had to be razed for the project.
Ground was broken July 24, 1997. This date coincided with the 150th anniversary of Mormon Pioneers entering the Salt Lake Valley, an event celebrated in Utah as Pioneer Day.
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