Admittedly, the Temple Square is pretty imposing. The power structure behind the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints, was moved by some pretty fervent emotions when they raised this edifice, but all the fervor in the world cannot induce any real creativity.
The whole pile of rocks comes out looking like a hodgepodge of every Pantheon and shrine raised since the pre-Grecian civilizations that existed about 4,000 years ago.
From Aldous Huxley, “Faith, Taste and History” - “[I]t was through sheets of falling water that we caught our first glimpse, above the chestnut trees, of a flood-lit object quite as difficult to believe in, despite the evidence
of our senses, as the strange history it commemorates.
The improbability of this greatest of the Mormon Temples does not consist in its astounding ugliness. Most Victorian churches are astoundingly ugly. It consists in a certain
combination of oddity, dullness, and monumentality unique, so far as I know, in the annals of architecture. For the most part, Victorian buildings are more or less learned pastiches of something else—something Gothic, something Greek or nobly Roman, something Elizabethan or Flamboyant
Flemish, or even vaguely Oriental. But this Temple looks like nothing on earth. and yet contrives to be completely unoriginal, utterly and uniformly prosaic.”
One of the harshest critiques of the Temple Square I have ever seen.
I drove by the Temple in San Diego several years ago. From a distance the spires looked HUGE! As I got closer I realized it was not so big, it had lots of gingerbread on the spires making it look big.