Companion revelations to the Plat, recorded that same spring of 1833, specified a design for one of the twenty-four public buildings the plat lays out.
What the revelations specify
Two revelations carry this plan, and they don’t do the same job. The first, section 94, names the building — “an house for the presidency” — gives the fifty-five-by-sixty-five-foot inner court figure, and calls for “a lower court and a higher court,” but explicitly defers the fuller pattern for those two courts to a later revelation: that design, it says, “shall be given unto you hereafter.” The second, section 95, dated 1 June 1833, is that promised follow-up — but before it delivers, it opens by rebuking the Saints for not having already built the house, calling their delay “a verry grievous sin.” Only after that rebuke does section 95 repeat the fifty-five-by-sixty-five figure and assign the two courts their functions: the lower dedicated to sacrament, preaching, fasting, and prayer, the higher to “the school of mine apostles.”
Two of the plat’s twenty-four numbered buildings, #5 and #17, were commanded to be built first, one from each of the two twelve-building blocks at the city’s center — #5 marked, in this site’s reading of the plat’s own key, with a large “1” beside it, indicating it was to be the first of the twenty-four raised.
verely I say unto you that it shall be built fifty five by sixty five in the width thereof and in the length thereof in the inner court … and there shall be a lower court and an higher court according to the pattern which shall be given unto you hereafter
What the drawn plan adds
A separate architectural drawing, in Frederick G. Williams’s hand, fills in the woodwork the revelation itself doesn’t specify. A broad stair and vestry occupied one end; four-tiered pulpits, graduated in height by fixed increments, stood at each end for the presidency, the bishop’s council, the high priests, and the elders, with a swing table in place of a pulpit stand for the lowest tier. The pews could be quartered by curtains — “vails” — lowered from the ceiling on hooks and rings, so the room could be divided for smaller meetings or opened fully for a single assembly. On the exterior, the plan calls for a building 28 feet high in two 14-foot stories, elliptical arches overhead, walls of brick and stone, gothic-topped windows and doors with “venetian” semicircular crowns, and a bell “of very large size.” The drawing itself closes with a note to its Missouri recipients: the plot for the city and the dimensions of the house, it says, “were given us of the Lord.”
This site’s reconstruction: an inner court within a larger building
This site reads “inner court” as naming one component of a larger structure, not the building’s full footprint. Working outward from the revealed 55-by-65-foot inner court, adding matching 16.5-foot courts to the east and west (with six-inch easements for the hanging veils) and then a 16.5-foot outer court running the full perimeter for stairs, halls, and other service space, this site’s analysis arrives at a five-story building 88 feet wide by 132 feet long — a figure that, notably, matches the plat’s own 132-foot street width. On this reading, each of the two courts could be quartered into four principal rooms, with further rooms in the “higher part of the inner court” and on the ground floor for other ordinances. This is this site’s own extension of the revealed figures, not a claim made explicitly by either the revelation or the drawn plan.
What was actually built
Only building #5 was ever begun, and not in Missouri. Kirtland’s own leaders, working from the same revealed 55-by-65-foot figure, built what became the Kirtland Temple — but its finished exterior measures roughly 59 by 79 feet and rises about 60 feet to the eaves, more than double the 28-foot height the Missouri plan called for. Construction shifted from the plan’s specified brick to local sandstone once a usable quarry was found nearby, finished in a stucco mixed with crushed glass and pottery donated by members for a marbled shine. Joseph Smith’s conceptual vision was converted into a buildable design by builders Artemus Millet, Jacob Bump, and Truman O. Angell, blending Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic, and Georgian elements rather than following the Missouri plan’s exterior notes point for point. It was dedicated on March 27, 1836, before a crowd of roughly a thousand. Its counterpart #17 and the other twenty-two buildings the plat calls for were never begun.
Sources: Joseph Smith Papers, “Plan of the House of the Lord, between 1 and 25 June 1833”; Doctrine and Covenants 94–95; independent architectural and historical accounts of the Kirtland Temple. This page paraphrases these sources rather than reproducing them; see the Source Index for links to the originals.