The news that a vast nuclear-powered AI data center being proposed for 9,000 acres of public land in eastern Utah comes cloaked in Mormon language feels like the latter days. In June, Project Beehive debuted a small test version of its modular nuclear reactor, which it calls Ward 250. The flaky startup behind Project Beehive has applied to build 456 wards, producing 9.6 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to the peak summer electrical capacity of the entire state. This semantic strategy serves to ease public perception of the proposal, and to lowkey blunt public criticism. It’s the localized cultural equivalent of Meta introducing its AI surveillance tool with a kawaii mascot, backed by Palmer Luckey and Palantir’s CTO.
When @peterhuestis joked about the reactors’ containment structure being the Golden Plates, though, I had an epiphany, if not a straight up vision. Now I want everything built in Utah, from the grifter nuclear reactor farms and grifter data centers, from the stripmalls and dirty soda drive-thrus, to my mid-mountain ski house in Alta, to honor the state’s Mormon vernacular architectural heritage by being shaped like the Golden Plates.
The Golden Plates are, of course, the ancient scriptural record Joseph Smith received from the angel Moroni, who, in his mortal life as a prophet, had buried the plates in a rural New York hillside 1400 years earlier. There’s a children’s song about the plates, and the date of Moroni’s first visit, September 22nd, 1823, is now celebrated as a holiday on tumblr. After finishing his translation of the plates, which became The Book of Mormon, Smith returned them to Moroni. But a dozen or more people around Smith knew, saw, or handled the plates before they were spirited away.
Their descriptions of the plates’ physical form differ in many seemingly specific ways, but the official assumption is that they were a six-inch tall stack of 8×6-inch metal sheets, engraved on both sides, and bound by three D-shaped rings, that weighed between 30 and 60 lbs. Depictions of the Golden Plates as a gold three-ring binder have so permeated church culture for two hundred years, I’d seen enough Golden Plates-shaped cakes to fill a pinterest board, long before pinterest was even invented.
This is all context for understanding the design of the church’s last World’s Fair pavilion, the The Book of Mormon Pavilion at Expo ’74 in Spokane, Washington. As a longtime student of both world’s fairs and Mormon architecture, I hated and ignored this building. I had been blind to this its power, but now I see.
For the newly globalizing church’s first world’s fair in New York in 1964, they built a blank pavilion fronted by a freestanding replica of the iconic facade of the Salt Lake Temple. A decade later, they’d learned from Las Vegas; The Book of Mormon Pavilion was both decorated shed and duck, both multimedia spectacle and pseudo-historical museum.
The most detailed account of the Expo ’74 pavilion I’ve found is from a BYU religious studies masters thesis submitted while the Spokane fair was still going; Gerald Joseph Peterson’s history of Mormon pavilions at World’s Expos [pdf]is primarily about New York ’64. but he has a chapter on the three fairs that followed. Spokane’s pavilion and exhibitions were designed by Elder Thomas D. Lasko, who led exhibition design for the Church’s Public Communications department, with John B. Molander as project architect. It was built by Warren J. Mathwig, a local Spokane church member who served as developer, contractor, and pavilion director.
The 40-by-80 foot wood-clad structure was built on pylons over the Spokane River, and accessed by a 20-foot walkway/bridge. The right side of the book was 20 feet tall and contained two amphitheaters where dioramas containing Hall of Presidents- and Tony Oursler-style film projections onto the faces mannequins depicting Moroni, his father Mormon, and Joseph Smith, told the story of Jesus Christ’s appearance in the ancient Americas as recorded and translated via the plates.
The left side, 12 feet tall, had an exhibition of Meso-American artifacts used to bolster the archaeological credibility of The Book of Mormon’s religious narrative, which was the futile custom at the time. Now I’m remembering why I ignored this pavilion for so long. Also, that’s a lot of programming for 3,000 square feet.
Anyway, I think what I missed was exactly the collapse of the duck/shed dichotomy into a content/utility unity. If you’re really in your enclave, believing you’re hastening the apocalypse you’re divinely appointed to escape, and that you’re going to get hashtag blessed by cleansing the earth with fire and rolling it up like a scroll, then absolutely build your reactors and data centers in the shape of a record telling the story of a genocidal, racism-obsessed civilization that wiped itself out while doing the same thing.
