Why are so many mormon temples in old Gothic architecture?
I don’t actually think there are any temples, much less many, built in the Gothic style of architecture? like, some huge parts of Gothic architecture are the immensity of the interior space (those vaulted ceilings!), the interplay of light you see in stained glass, and the intricacy and dizzying detail seen in the gargoyles and carvings of saints:
Mormon temples don’t really do this! Indeed a large number of them, built from the same basic blueprint during the 1990s, follow what’s maybe the least? Gothic design possible:
(this is Anchorage, Alaska, by the way)
When you talk about “Gothic” Mormon temples, I have to assume you’re talking about the four temples built in Utah during the nineteenth century: St. George, Logan, Manti, and especially Salt Lake:
St. George doesn’t look Gothic; it looks like you stuck some medieval ramparts on the roof of a New England colonial church. Those ramparts and the slight buttresses that descend from them are kind of like the contemporaneous Gothic Revival style, but only in the same way that Star Wars is kind of like Star Trek because they both happen in space and have “star” in the title–if you squint, some of the same elements are there, but they’re really not used in a way that fits the Neo-Gothic style.
Logan is more explicitly medieval-esque: it’s got those rook turrets, and the revealed stone (not the architect’s original intent!) leaves it looking more like a castle. The ramparts also look more elaborate than St. George’s, although I’m not entirely sure that’s not another accident of the paint wearing off. But it’s still too blocky and not nearly pointy enough to count as Gothic! That might be different if the towers ended in spires and not barn toppers, but they don’t.
Manti is really close in design to Logan, but it comes out looking much more European. That’s not because it’s Gothic Revival; instead, I’d pin it on the more understated side of the Baroque Revival which is basically to say: it looks like a French chateau.
If you were going to pin down any Mormon temple as being Gothic or Gothic Revival, your best option would be Salt Lake. If you made that case, you’d have the Wikipedia page on Gothic Revival architecture agreeing with you, which isn’t nothing. But look at literally every other example of the Neo-Gothic style on that wiki page: they’re all a lot more complicated and intricate than the straight-forward, bold, iconic profile the Salt Lake Temple cuts. It’s got the spires you see in Gothic architecture, but much more square than usual. Gothic cathedrals want to dazzle you, but this temple just wants to awe you; it’s playing a different game.
Now’s a good time to talk about interiors:
Almost all of the space in a Gothic cathedral is taken up by one giant room in the shape of a cross. The largest section of this room, the nave, is where the laypeople sit to watch the priest at the altar placed in the crossing; the choir sits behind there. The only meaningful subdivisions of this giant liturgical space are the smaller chapels often stuffed along the walls of the nave and in the transepts, and even they’re still contained in this one big room.
Contrast that with the way the interior of the Salt Lake Temple is set up, as seen in this cutaway model. You don’t walk in and get struck by the immensity of one giant space. Instead, rooms required for each element of the ordinances performed in the temple are kind of just crammed wherever they’ll fit; the only controlling idea behind the use of space is that each of the successive endowment rooms is placed higher than the next. The only large room in the temple is the top-floor assembly hall, which is more a vestigial element from the pre-endowment plans for Kirtland and Nauvoo than an essential part of the building. Gothic cathedrals are built for large, public liturgy; temples are built for smaller, more private liturgy. (It’s also worth noting here that the interior decor of the Salt Lake Temple is not mimicking Gothic Revival either; in the places where it’s not just murals, it’s much more imitative of Rococo).
So, if no Mormon temples are really Gothic, what are they? That’s a hard question because all of them really are architectural mutts (and I mean that in the best possible way). Truman Angell, the architect behind three of these temples (he didn’t do Manti), did go on a mission to Europe to review architecture (including Gothic and Gothic Revival buildings) but he “was generally neither very impressed by nor very interested in the great buildings of Britain and France…Angell’s taste in architecture seems to have been firmly set in favor of American simplicity,” a fact that’s reflected in the way his temples mute and assimilate their European elements into an eclectic, simple, and unique style. They’re not really classifiable as any one thing.
(special thanks to @justthatspiffy, who’s taken more than the one semester and couple hundred wiki crawls that make up the sum total of my art history knowledge, and who was invaluable in hashing out the architecture terminology so I didn’t make an entire fool out of myself with it)
