Constitutional Architecture in the Plot and House Pattern

Purpose, Scope, and Method

This paper examines the relationship between the Plot, the building documents now archived as Sections 94 and 95, the Independence House design, the Kirtland building, and the later houses as a matter of constitutional interpretation. The issue is not the appearance of individual buildings but the constitutional order expressed through public buildings, courts, chambers, schools, presidencies, and assigned places. The analysis therefore turns on source hierarchy, original language, and historical development rather than architecture alone.

Several witnesses preserve the pattern in different forms. The Plot establishes the framework. Sections 94 and 95 elaborate it. The first Independence House design expresses it architecturally. The 1836 Kirtland building implements parts of it. Later plans and later houses modify it. Because the witnesses agree in some respects and diverge in others, interpretation must begin with chronology, hierarchy, and original wording. This paper operates at the documentary-recovery layer: it recovers the controlling words in their own register and shows how they constrain one another. The Constitutional Master carries those recovered terms one step further, translating them into the modern bureau, agency, and governance vocabulary of the working system. The two are complementary rather than competing — this paper supplies the documentary anchor; the Master supplies the modern translation.

Five principles govern the argument. Chronology: earlier sources carry greater authority than later ones. Hierarchy: the LAW is foundational, the Plot establishes the public-building pattern, Sections 94 and 95 elaborate it, and later witnesses occupy lower levels. Preservation of original language: courts should not become floors, houses should not become temples in analysis, presidencies should not become councils, and chambers should not become classrooms or balconies, because such substitutions quietly discard constitutional meaning. The distinction between concepts and implementations: dimensions and design solutions change, but constitutional concepts recur. And convergence: the key words function as simultaneous constraints, and the correct reading is the one in which all of them remain true at once.

The Convergence Test: Why the Key Words Must Be Read Together

The key words of the LAW, the Plot, Sections 94 and 95, the House plan, and the November 1831 quorum document do not function as independent labels that can be translated one at a time. They function as a single system of constraints. Each word fixes one dimension of the design, and only when all of them are held together does one precise public-building system emerge. Relax any one of them and the reading slides into a simpler, more familiar shape: courts become floors, chambers become assembly seating, and twenty-four distributed buildings collapse into one central building. The drift is not carelessness; it is the path of least resistance, and the original vocabulary is precisely what blocks it.

The words are interlocking rather than additive. “Inner court” does work only if an outer court surrounds it — that single word forces a building larger than the fifty-five-by-sixty-five figure, and the Plot’s block geometry supplies the surrounding shell at eighty-eight by one hundred thirty-two feet. “Lower court” and “higher court” make sense only as two complete governing courts of equal rank; read as lower and upper floor they become a vertical stack, and “higher” silently acquires a rank it never had. “The higher part of the inner court” is a third, separate expression — not the higher court — and collapsing it into “school floor” pulls education out of the court system and loses an entire tier. “A chamber and not a gallery” insists on participant space rather than spectator space, and that one phrase is what allows the upper tier to hold offices, councils, and a school rather than rows of onlookers. “Fourteen feet between floors” and the “twenty-eight-foot court, each story being fourteen feet” lock the court to exactly two tiers, which is why the system does not drift toward the five and six specialized floors of the later houses.

Table 1. The convergence constraints. Each key word fixes one dimension of the system; releasing any one of them produces a recognizable historical drift.

Two features of this cross-section are decisive and are exactly what the later builders missed. First, the higher part of the inner court is not an attic or a gallery above an assembly hall; it is a fourteen-foot tier of chambers integral to each court, serving as the school during public operation and as offices and council rooms during governance. Second, the outer court is not leftover margin; the sixteen-and-a-half-foot band of hallways, stairs, elevators, and bathrooms on all four sides is the entry-and-exit system that lets the building function as a public structure. Remove the outer court and the courts can no longer be entered and emptied safely; remove the higher part of the inner court and the offices, councils, and school have nowhere constitutional to go. The later houses dropped both, and the system silently narrowed.

Chronological Register of the Documents

Table 2. Chronological register of the documentary and architectural witnesses.

Constitutional Hierarchy of Sources

A constitutional hierarchy determines how conflicts between sources are weighed. Some sources establish the pattern; others elaborate, implement, or interpret it. Conflicts are resolved by moving upward in the hierarchy rather than downward. The LAW is foundational: it establishes stewardship, bishops, elders, the storehouse, residue, and the framework that later documents assume. The Plot is next: it establishes twenty-four equal public buildings, institutional rows, and the public-building pattern. Sections 94 and 95 follow: they do not create a new pattern but elaborate courts, inner courts, and the fifty-five-by-sixty-five dimension within the existing one. Below these come the original Independence design, the revised Independence documents, the Kirtland plat and building, the Far West plat, the later houses, and finally later interpretation. Concepts that recur across several independent levels deserve more weight than concepts appearing in only one source, and original terminology deserves more weight than later substitutions.

Table 3. Constitutional hierarchy of sources, from the foundational LAW to later interpretation.

The Language of the Canon and the Pattern of Lexical Drift

Constitutional meaning often resides in the original vocabulary, and later difficulties arise when original terms are replaced with more familiar substitutes. The documents use house as their governing word, court for the governing space, and the House plan insists on chamber over gallery: “there will not be a gallery but a chamber.” A gallery serves spectators; a chamber serves participants. The chamber is therefore a constitutional space, not an architectural compartment.

Frederick G. Williams stands unusually close to the pattern, occupying four roles at once. As witness he participates in the design of the house; as recorder he writes the Plot and the building documents; as designer he expresses the pattern architecturally in the House plan; and as interpreter he frequently explains the pattern in familiar Kirtland vocabulary. Because he holds all four roles, his documents show that interpretation can begin immediately rather than generations later — and they let us separate what was preserved from what was translated. His strongest evidence is not the changing terminology but the repeated geometry and structure, which he preserves with notable consistency even where wording shifts.

Table 4. Key source language and how this paper carries it forward. Spellings such as “Aron,” “vailes,” and “eleptical” are reproduced as written in the sources.

Table 5. Lexical drift and the preferred constitutional reading. The substitutions are individually plausible but collectively dismantle the system.

The 55 × 65 Inner Court Within the Plot, and the 88 × 132 Building

Because the Plot comes first, Sections 94 and 95 define the inner court within an existing public-building pattern rather than creating that pattern. When Section 94 commands that construction proceed “according to the pattern which I have given unto you,” it refers to a pattern already in existence. The Plot has already established twenty-four equal public buildings, institutional rows, and a block geometry before the fifty-five-by-sixty-five specification appears; the building documents identify a component within that larger system, not the whole building.

The phrase inner court carries the weight. If the documents meant the entire building, simpler language was available. Instead they name an inner court, which implies an outer court around it. The Plot supplies the outer dimension: within the colored public blocks, three buildings across with the prescribed spacing yield an eighty-eight-by-one-hundred-thirty-two-foot footprint. Ringing the fifty-five-by-sixty-five inner court with a one-perch service band on all four sides, and adding the two pulpit zones, produces exactly that shell and a full ninety-nine-by-fifty-five governance court inside it. The fifty-five-by-sixty-five court is thus a constitutional core within a substantially larger public building, not the building itself.

The Court-and-Chamber System and the Higher Part of the Inner Court

The documents consistently use court rather than floor, hall, or auditorium, and they distinguish three separate expressions: the lower court and higher court (two complete courts), and the lower part and higher part of the inner court (two tiers within a court). Treating these as synonyms, or as floors, is the principal interpretive error affecting later understanding. The lower and higher courts are two complete governing courts of equal rank — a point Kirtland preserved more faithfully than many later interpreters recognized — while the higher part of the inner court is the upper fourteen-foot tier within a court, assigned by Section 95 to the school.

The chamber resolves what that higher part is for. “There will not be a gallery but a chamber” rejects spectator space in favor of participant space, so the higher part of the inner court is not a balcony over an assembly hall but a tier of working chambers. During public operation those chambers serve as the school; during governance they serve as offices for presidencies, council rooms for councils of twelve, and study and training space. The same constitutional space changes function with the building’s operating mode, which is why governance, education, worship, and administration can share one architecture without separate buildings.

The office arithmetic follows directly. Each chamber floor holds twelve chambers (six on each side of the arch), large enough for a council of twelve and divisible into offices; two chamber floors plus the first-floor offices close each building at eighty offices. Eighty offices across the Plot’s twenty-four buildings yield one thousand nine hundred twenty — the same total reached from the other direction by the four hundred eighty seats of each court multiplied across the four courts of the two named buildings. The first floor, with its pools and additional offices, is therefore not an optional extra; it is the layer required to close each building at eighty offices once the chamber tiers are counted.

What Kirtland Built

Kirtland is a construction witness supported only by fragmentary plan evidence: the full original drawings have not been found, and the Joseph Smith Papers identify just four fragments. The standing building preserves the strongest dimensional constant — the fifty-five-by-sixty-five inner court — and the east and west pulpits, but it compresses the larger system. The building has two complete courts stacked vertically, which faithfully preserves the lower-court / higher-court distinction; but it lacks the outer service court and does not realize the higher part of the inner court as a tier of chambers.

The pulpits survive and are eloquent. The east end carries the Aaronic pulpits and the west end the Melchizedek pulpits, each a stack of four seats — in the House plan, Elders lowest, then High Priests, then the Presidency, then the Bishop. Movable pews let the congregation “face other pulpit as occasion may require,” realizing the transformability the House plan prescribes.

The Regression of the Houses: Drift and the Tension to Keep the Appearance

The later houses display a single long movement away from the prescription, accompanied by a persistent effort to keep its outward appearance. Each building retains visible features — pulpits at both ends, tiered Aaronic and Melchizedek seats, paired assembly spaces — while quietly abandoning the constitutional system those features once expressed. The drift and the appearance run together, which is exactly why it is hard to see: the buildings look like the pattern even as they cease to be it.

Nauvoo takes the first step. It adds a first-floor baptistry and moves the offices and council room into an attic above the assembly rooms, rather than realizing them as the higher part of the inner court. The two stacked assembly rooms still echo the two courts, but the higher part of the inner court has been lost as a design idea, and the building no longer belongs to a twenty-four-building system.

The next stage turns on who built and what he knew. Brigham Young had been present at both Kirtland and Nauvoo, and in 1865 he obtained the original Independence documents from Lydia Partridge — the Plot and the House plan that had been out of reach for three decades. Yet when he began St. George soon afterward, he did not return to the full pattern those documents preserved; he reverted to the Nauvoo type he already knew. The documents were recovered, but the design was not.

St. George, Logan, and Manti therefore form a distinct group: patterned after Nauvoo rather than after Kirtland or the original House plan, they inherit Nauvoo’s approximately eighty-eight-by-one-hundred-thirty-two-foot footprint and its two stacked courts. They come closer to the prescription than Kirtland did in some respects, recovering roughly the correct outer dimension and keeping the two courts, and they even gesture at the higher part of the inner court by placing small attic-like rooms where the fourteen-foot chambers belong. But the decisive element is still missing: there is no outer court. Without the sixteen-and-a-half-foot service band of hallways, stairs, and elevators, those attic rooms cannot be reached or used as the working chambers the documents require; they are stranded above the assembly halls. These three buildings are the most instructive stage of the drift — a design with the right size, the two courts, and even a token of the higher-part chambers, yet unable to function as the system because the circulation court that connects everything was never built.

Salt Lake belongs earlier in this story than its 1893 completion suggests. It was planned in the 1850s, before St. George, and was always far larger than the prescription — evidence that the assembly-hall conception of the courts, as great halls rather than fields holding a fixed number of governing seats, was already settled before the building program began. After Brigham Young’s death, Truman O. Angell led the change that fixed the final form. The higher court was kept as a very large assembly hall, still carrying the two pulpits with twelve seats on each side, while the lower court was converted to endowment use. The conversion began with the lower court at St. George and then spread to the others, so that across the early houses — including the rebuilt Nauvoo — only the higher court survived as a court at all, and even that was now called an assembly hall. The lower court, the higher part of the inner court, and the outer service court had all fallen away.

Table 6. The regression of the witnesses: selective preservation, increasing specialization, and the persistent tension to keep the appearance of the original.

Conclusion

The original pattern is constitutional architecture expressed through public buildings, and it is recoverable only by holding every key word at once. The Plot establishes twenty-four equal public buildings; Sections 94 and 95 define the inner court, the lower and higher courts, and the higher part of the inner court within that system; the House plan fixes the chamber, the fourteen-foot floors, the twenty-eight-foot court, and the mirrored pulpits; and the November 1831 document supplies the quorum sizes that close each court at four hundred eighty seats. Geometry and quorum arithmetic converge independently on one thousand nine hundred twenty offices across twenty-four eighty-office buildings. That convergence is the proof of the design.

The drift is equally instructive. Relax inner court and the building shrinks to its core; relax court and governance becomes assembly; relax chamber and the working tier becomes a gallery; relax twenty-four buildings and the system collapses to one. The Kirtland, Nauvoo, St. George, Logan, Manti, and Salt Lake houses walk that path step by step, each preserving the appearance of the pattern — paired pulpits, stacked halls, tiered seats — while losing the higher part of the inner court and the outer service court that made the buildings function. The earliest documents remain indispensable precisely because they preserve the whole system before that narrowing began.

Primary Sources

Quorum document, Nov. 11, 1831. Office hierarchy and quorum sizes — a president over 12 deacons, 24 teachers, 48 priests, and 96 elders — supplying the seat populations that close each court at 480.

Plot. Joseph Smith Papers, “Plat of the City of Zion, circa Early June–25 June 1833,” Church History Library. Text and drawings in the hand of Frederick G. Williams; sent to Missouri with the 25 June 1833 letter. The controlling discussion term is Plot, following the document’s own self-description.

Section 94. Joseph Smith Papers, “Revelation, 2 August 1833–B [D&C 94],” Revelation Book 2, hand of Frederick G. Williams. Dated May 6, 1833 in the key-word record; gives the house for the presidency, the 55×65 inner court, and the lower and higher courts.

Section 95. Joseph Smith Papers, “Revelation, 1 June 1833 [D&C 95],” Revelation Book 2, hand of Orson Hyde. Gives the manner of building, the 55×65 inner court, and the lower and higher parts of the inner court, the higher part assigned to the school.

House plan. Joseph Smith Papers, “Plan of the House of the Lord, between 1 and 25 June 1833,” hand of Frederick G. Williams; presented by Lydia Partridge in 1865. Source of “not a gallery but a chamber,” the 14-foot floors and 28-foot court, the mirrored pulpits, curtains and veils, and the note that the plot and the house dimensions “were given us of the Lord.”

Kirtland plan fragments. Joseph Smith Papers, “Plan of the House of the Lord in Kirtland, Ohio (Fragments), circa June 1833” — four fragments only; the basis for treating Kirtland as a construction witness with fragmentary plan evidence.

Kirtland plat and 1837 map. Joseph Smith Papers, “Plat of Kirtland, Ohio, not before 2 August 1833” and “Map of Kirtland City, 1837” — city-planning witnesses showing movement toward a centered, simplified town plan.

Revised Plot and revised House. Joseph Smith Papers, “Revised Plat of the City of Zion, circa Early August 1833” and “Revised Plan of the House of the Lord, circa 10 August–circa 4 September 1833” — comparison witnesses tracing early adaptation.

Far West. Joseph Smith Papers, “Plat of Far West, Missouri, 1838,” with place records for the planned central house site — evidence of late-stage simplification to a single public center.

Carmack on the Plot language. Stanford Carmack, “On Doctrine and Covenants language and the 1833 Plot of Zion” (2016), used for the argument that the Plot’s layout, dimensions, and wording were tightly controlled, anchored in Williams’s note that the plot and house dimensions “were given us of the Lord.”