From the list of people who thought they were infallible last Wednesday, please scratch my name.
In a column I wrote about the woeful showing of the Salt Lake Temple in a survey of Salt Lake architects, I gave a man named Don Carlos Smith credit as being the temple architect after Truman Angell, the original architect, died.
Well, that's not right.
Pull out last Wednesday's column and replace "Smith" with "Young."
It was Joseph Don Carlos Young.
The error was brought to my attention by an alert Salt Lake reader who wrote, "The person who took over from Truman Angell was not Don Carlos Smith but was Joseph Don Carlos Young, Brigham's son. The reason I know this is that he was my grandfather."
It was signed, "Sincerely, Joseph H. Young, Architect."
I phoned the great-grandson of Brigham Young, the grandson of Joseph Don Carlos Young and the son of Don Carlos Young Jr., and asked if I could drop by his home and apologize in person.
"Sure," he said.
At age 74, Joseph H. Young is still an active architect, with more than 300 buildings to his credit and counting. He worked on the 28-story LDS Church Office Building on North Temple, and his father was a primary architect on the original LDS Church Office Building on South Temple.
The original Joseph Young not only supervised the completion of the outside of the Salt Lake Temple but also designed all of the interior. His grandson said that among his grandfather's greatest contributions was to insist that the six spires atop the temple be made out of granite, just like the walls below.
Truman Angell's plans called for the spires to be made out of wood and wrapped in sheet metal.
Architecture has run in the Young family ever since Brigham Young appointed Joseph Don Carlos Young as LDS Church architect way back in the 1870s.
There was a lot of Young nepotism back then.
Joseph H. was 11 years old when Joseph Don Carlos died in 1938. He doesn't remember a lot of conversations with his grandfather about his work on the temple. He was always busy building other things. But he did pass on to him an abiding love for architecture.
If the temple didn't get a lot of votes in the architects' survey, it did get a lot of votes from nonarchitects.
Within 24 hours, I received more than two dozen e-mails on the subject.
I enjoyed all of them, primarily because they universally agreed with me. It was unanimous: As an architectural one-of-a-kind and the city's signature building, the temple deserves more credit.
One respondent, Lyle from Dallas, wrote:
"I live in Dallas now and trust me, when I fly into SLC I drive right into town and take a loop around the temple before heading to my folks' house in Pocatello. Been out of the Rockies since the early '80s. Never been in the temple (I'm not THAT bad a Mormon, but not that good either), and I know most of the other buildings mentioned (in the survey) and would vote them all lower."
Another writer took a shot at the architects who participated in the survey. "My suspicion is that most architects admire the kind of design they are taught to admire and that is perhaps slightly out of their own reach (Symphony Hall), dislike design within their own reach (Grand Hotel, Matheson Courthouse) and ignore completely design entirely beyond their abilities (the temple)."
It was signed, "Lowly architect's wife and admirer of the temple."
Let's leave it at that.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.