In temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), an ordinance room is a room where the ceremony known as the Endowment is administered, as well as other ordinances such as Sealings. Some temples perform a progressive-style ordinance where patrons move from room to room, each room representing a progression of mankind: the Creation room, representing the Genesis creation story; the Garden room represents the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve lived prior to the fall of man; the World room, where Adam and Eve lived after the fall; the Terrestrial room; and the Celestial room representing the Celestial Kingdom of God, or more commonly, heaven. There is also an additional ordinance room, the Sealing room, and at least one temple has a Holy of Holies. These two rooms are reserved for the administration of ordinances beyond the Endowment. The Holy of Holies is representative of that talked about when the temple is discussed in the bible.
Development of ordinance rooms
The first building to have ordinance rooms, designed to conduct the Endowment, was Joseph Smith's store in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1842. Using canvas, Smith divided the store's large, second-floor room into "departments," which represented "the interior of a temple as much as circumstances would permit" (Anderson & Bergera, Quorum of Anointed, 2). The departments included a garden with potted plants and a veil. (Anderson & Bergera, Quorum of Anointed, 3–4). After conducting the endowment services, Smith told Brigham Young, "This is not arranged right but we have done the best we could under the circumstances in which we are placed." Smith concluded that he wanted Young to "organize and systemize all these ceremonies." (Anderson & Bergera, Quorum of Anointed, 6–7). After Smith's death in 1844, Young also used canvas to divide the large attic room in the Nauvoo Temple in the departments. Participants in the Nauvoo Temple ceremonies used the same names for these departments as the ordinance rooms in later temples: Garden Room, World Room, Terrestrial Room, Celestial Room, and Sealing Room, which was also called the Holy of Holies. (Anderson & Bergera, Endowment Companies, 2–4, 377; Smith, 204–206). With the resumption of temple ordinances in Salt Lake City in the 1850s, Young followed the same method of using canvas to divide an upper floor of the Council House into the ordinance departments (Hyde, 90–99).
The above arrangement for administering the Endowment consisted of only temporary modifications to a building's interior rooms; obviously canvas partitions were not meant to be permanent. The first building to be designed specifically with actual progressive-style ordinance rooms for presentation of the Endowment was the Endowment House built in 1855 on Temple Square. This structure had the same rooms as the Nauvoo Temple and Council House, including a Garden Room with murals and potted evergreen plants, but the sealing room was not called the Holy of Holies (Tingen, 10). However, when the St. George Temple was completed in 1877, Young followed the Nauvoo Temple pattern of using "frame petitions [sic., partitions] with the curtains and doors" for Endowment rooms (McKinney, 7:305). Apparently, the rooms were later made more permanent in 1881, when a group of Utah artists painted murals on the walls (O'Brien, 14–15).
Four-room progressive style
Perhaps, using the precedent of the rooms in Endowment House and St. George, architect Truman O. Angell, Jr., specifically designed the Logan Temple interior with progressive ordinance rooms; the first temple so designed, which was dedicated in 1884. Manti Temple architect William Folsom, followed the same arrangement for that temple, which was dedicated in 1888. Based on his experience with the Logan Temple, Angell petitioned church president John Taylor to override Young's original design for the Salt Lake Temple's interior with progressive ordinance rooms, which Taylor enthusiastically approved (Salt Lake Temple, 54–55). This became the pattern for all temples until the construction of the Swiss Temple, when non-progressive ordinance rooms were developed to incorporate the new filmed Endowment ceremony (Buerger, 166).
The following description of the various rooms is based on James E. Talmage's The House of the Lord, which is typical of similar rooms in other LDS Church temples. These ordinance rooms reflect the overall temple ceremonies, which is an overview of God's plan for humanity. Beginning with the creation, the endowment reviews man's mortal existence, and what one must do in order to return to God's presence as husband and wife with their children.