(Feature photo of the LDS Conference Center by A.J. Buruca)

General conference is this weekend, which means people will be flooding in and out of the LDS Conference Center just north of Temple Square. So we thought we’d share some incredible facts about the center.

Located directly north of the Salt Lake Temple, the Conference Center was built in order to accommodate the vast number of members who wanted to attend General Conference in person. The original Tabernacle on Temple Square couldn’t seat very many people.

The scope of this building is tremendous – it is built upon an entire 120-acre city block. There is an actual river running across the entire roof before falling down a 67-foot waterfall on the side of the building. Surrounding the river on the roof, there is an entire garden made of hundreds of trees and three acres of grass. The main assembly hall has seating for 21,000 people and is the world’s biggest of its kind. To put that into perspective, the auditorium could easily hold a Boeing 747 with room to spare!

If those few things above weren’t enough for you, here are five more fascinating facts about the inside of the Conference Center, in no particular order:

1 – Pipe Organ

It may not look like it at first glance, but the center’s pipe organ has over 7,700 pipes, with the largest measuring over 3 feet wide. Most of the smaller pipes aren’t even visible to the audience. It’s so big and complex, it wasn’t ready for use until three years after the Conference Center was completed.

2 – Teleprompter

The custom-designed teleprompter displays words ONLY to the speaker who is standing right at pulpit. With a bit of careful engineering and science, it uses the principles of optics and light waves to create a projector that focuses the teleprompter’s words only on the podium. Someone standing even a few feet to the left or the right can’t see what is being displayed.

3 – Acoustics

The acoustics in the Conference Center are immaculate and beautiful. Normally a building this large and complex, with so many different uses, flat walls, microphones and speakers, would be full of echoes and feedback. But this building is very different. It does still echo a little bit, which is hard to avoid is a space like this, but overall it adapts very well to the acoustical demands. The placement of speakers was carefully calculated in order to compensate for sound lag and therefore eliminate echo and other negative effects.

4 – Translating Booths

As you probably know, every session of General Conference is broadcast and streamed all over the world in 92 different languages. But it takes approximately 800 people to translate the conference messages, with two people in the booths and others outside the booths evaluating the quality of the translations. There are nearly 60 booths used for these translations.

5 – Art Gallery

The Conference Center is also a wonderful gallery of museum-quality original artwork. There is a wonderful gallery of busts of all 16 presidents of the Church, as well as paintings of every member of the Twelve Apostles in the history of the Church. The building is also host to a variety of paintings and sculptures that illustrate stories from the scriptures and represent principles of the gospel.