The temple Syracuse
Twelve acres, ninety thousand square feet and a spire higher than any natural ground in the city
The Syracuse temple, and the wetland plants in its windows.
Dedicated on 8 June 2025 at 1098 South 2500 West, and by every published dimension the largest structure in this city: 90,526 square feet on 12.268 acres, 219 feet 8 inches to the top of the spire. The exterior stone was fabricated in Italy and the faceted art glass in Verona, and the Church's own media kit explains the palette by naming the lake three miles west and four plants that grow on its edge. This page is the building, the grounds, the materials and the access, and it is not about anybody who uses it.
Southern Utah is where I actually work, four hours south of the west shore of Davis County, so these pages are researched rather than lived. What is on them was read where it is issued: the city's own history, parks, museum, fire, police, secondary water, fireworks and recreation tax pages at syracuseut.gov; Utah State Parks on the island's fee card and its own dated history; the state road layer and the Utah Department of Transportation's 2024 traffic counts for the three routes that end at the causeway; the Census geocoder for the city line; the United States Geological Survey elevation service for the ground itself; the Church's own media kit for the temple; and the operator's own site for the farm. Every figure carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent takes the ground level work.
The live question
What is the building at 1098 South 2500 West, and can you go and look at it?
It is a temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, dedicated on 8 June 2025, and by every published dimension it is the largest single structure in this city. The Church's own media kit gives the property as 12.268 acres, the building as 90,526 square feet and the height to the top of the spire as 219 feet 8 inches. The site geocodes inside Syracuse city and sits at about 4,281 feet on the United States Geological Survey elevation service, which means the tip of the spire is roughly 4,500 feet above sea level, about a hundred and fifty feet higher than any natural ground measured anywhere inside the city limits.
The sequence is short and fully dated. Announced on 5 April 2020. Groundbreaking on 12 June 2021. A public open house from 10 to 31 May 2025. Dedication on 8 June 2025. Both of those events are in the past, so this is a permanent building page rather than an event page and it reads that way. The architect was Architectural Nexus, the interior design was by Robert McArthur Studios with Architectural Nexus, and the contractor was Wadman Corporation.
On whether you can go and look at it, the honest answer is that the issuing body does not publish one. The building's own listing, checked in August 2026, carries the street address, a telephone number and a line saying that reservations are available and walk ins are welcome, and it carries no statement at all about grounds hours, visitor parking, whether the grounds are open to the public, or any visitor centre. This page will not fill that in with an assumption. The telephone number on that listing is the only published route to the answer and it is the one worth using before driving over.
The building, in published figures
90,526
square feet, on the Church's own media kit
219 ft 8 in
to the top of the spire
12.268
acres of property
8 June 2025
dedicated, after an open house of 10 to 31 May
The specification
White granite from Tuscany, faceted glass from Verona, and a fence described down to the finish on the walkways.
The media kit for this building is unusually complete for a structure of any kind, and almost none of it has been written down anywhere else. Below is what it publishes, checked in August 2026, with the practical meaning of each line where there is one.
| Element | What is published | Who made or did it | What it means on the street |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structure | Steel frame with a White Moncini granite exterior | Architectural Nexus as architect, Wadman Corporation as contractor | A steel framed building with a stone skin rather than a stone building, which is why the walls read as flat panels rather than as courses |
| Exterior stone | White Moncini granite | Fabricated by Campolonghi of Montignoso, Italy; installed by IMS Masonry of Lindon, Utah | The stone crossed an ocean and the masons came from Utah County. Montignoso is in the Apuan marble country above Carrara |
| Art glass | Faceted crystal in blue, yellow, green, red, orange and white | Designed by Architectural Nexus with assistance from Holdman Studios; fabricated by Progetto Arte Poli of Verona, Italy; installed by Steel Encounters | Faceted crystal reads differently from painted glass. It throws colour rather than filtering it, and the effect changes through the day |
| The motif in the glass | Transitioning greens, blues and yellows described as representative of the reflections of the lake | The Church's own media kit | The design references the water three miles west, and the media kit gives the reason in the community's own nickname as the gateway to Antelope Island |
| The plants in the design | Snowball sand verbena, desert paintbrush, common cattail and reeds | The Church's own media kit, describing the local flora around the Great Salt Lake and nearby wetlands | Four specific species, three of them wetland plants. This is the only building in the county that puts the shoreline's own vegetation into its fabric |
| Terra cotta | Terra cotta elements | Syzygy Tile of Silver City, New Mexico; installed by Peritia Stone | A third material and a third supply chain, from a small New Mexico tile works |
| Fencing | Metal fence with precast columns along the street; painted precast fence along the sides and back | The media kit's own description | The street elevation is open metal between columns and the flanks are solid, which is why the site reads as enclosed from three sides and not from the road |
| Walkways | Concrete with surface retarder and an etched finish, plus manufactured stone pavers | The media kit's own description | Surface retarder exposes the aggregate, so the paths are textured rather than smooth. That is a maintenance and grip decision as much as an aesthetic one |
| Interior design | By Robert McArthur Studios and Architectural Nexus | The media kit's own credits | The interior is not open to the public and is not described on this page beyond the credit |
Every line is from the Syracuse Utah Temple media kit published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints newsroom, checked in August 2026. Elevation figures are from the United States Geological Survey elevation point query service, checked the same month. The City of Syracuse planning file for the site, with its site plan, traffic study and landscaping conditions, is a separate public record, and nothing from it is repeated here.
The one sentence in the media kit that connects this building to the rest of the city
The Church's own document explains the palette by naming the place. It says the transitioning greens, blues and yellows in the art glass are representative of the reflections of the lake, as this community is considered the gateway to Antelope Island. That is the issuing body, in print, calling Syracuse the gateway to the island, and then putting the lake's own colours and the wetland's own plants into the largest building in the city.
It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. Most large buildings in Utah suburbs are designed to look like large buildings in Utah suburbs. This one is designed around a specific three mile relationship with a specific body of water, using four named species that grow on its edge. Whatever else it is, it is the only structure in this county that treats the shoreline as a subject rather than as a view, and that makes it a genuine companion to the road that runs out to the water from the same city.
The plants are worth naming individually because they are checkable. Snowball sand verbena is a low sprawling plant of sand and dune ground. Desert paintbrush is the dry ground species. Common cattail and reeds are the wetland margin. Three of the four are what grows where the water and the land meet, which is exactly the ground the county's birding subject is about.
The details
Getting there
2500 West is a north south road on the west side of the city's residential grid, and the site sits between Antelope Drive and the 1000 South line, about a mile and a half from City Hall. No statement of grounds hours, visitor parking or grounds access is published on the building's own listing, which carries an address, a telephone number and nothing else on the subject, so the practical instruction is to ring that number rather than to arrive and find out.
Before you go
- Grounds access and parking are not published by the issuing body. Ring the number on the building's own listing before making a trip out of it.
- The building itself is not open to the public and no visitor centre exists on the site.
- The exterior is the subject. The stone, the fence, the walkway finish and the art glass are all described in the media kit and all of them are visible from a public street.
- The best light on faceted crystal is not the middle of the day. It throws colour rather than filtering it, so early and late are the times the glass does what it was designed to do.
The siting
Twelve acres on a residential collector, and a spire higher than any ground in the city.
The geometry is the part a person weighing a nearby address actually needs, and it can be done from published figures without any speculation. The ground under the site reads about 4,281 feet on the United States Geological Survey elevation service. The published height to the top of the spire is 219 feet 8 inches. That puts the tip at roughly 4,500 feet above sea level. The highest natural ground measured anywhere in this city on the same service, at a sample point near the northeast corner, is about 4,350 feet. So the spire stands about a hundred and fifty feet above the highest ground in Syracuse, on a plain with no bench and no mountain front inside the limits, which is why it is visible from most of the western half of the city and from the causeway approach.
The site itself is 12.268 acres on 2500 West, which is a north south collector rather than an arterial and carries no state route number and no traffic count station. That is a real difference from a site on Antelope Drive, where the Utah Department of Transportation's 2024 counts run from 3,000 a day at the west end to 28,000 at 2000 West. A twelve acre site with concentrated arrival and departure patterns on a collector road is a genuine change to a residential grid, and the documents that would describe how the city handled it, the site plan, any conditional use, a traffic study and the landscaping conditions, sit in the City of Syracuse Planning Commission and City Council record.
None of that record is summarized here, and the gap is named rather than filled with an inference. Anybody weighing a street within a few blocks of 2500 West between Antelope Drive and 1000 South should ask for it directly: the city's agenda and minutes archive is public, the file will be indexed by the site address, and it is the only place the actual conditions attached to the approval are written down. A page like this one can describe a building accurately and cannot tell you what a specific street sounds like on a specific evening.
What can be said from the fabric is that the site was designed to be looked at from the street on one side and screened on the other three. The media kit describes a metal fence with precast columns along the street and a painted precast fence along the sides and back, which is a deliberate difference between the public elevation and the flanks. Combined with the walkway finish and the exterior stone, that is a description of an enclosure rather than a campus.
Granite from the Apuan Alps, faceted crystal from Verona, terra cotta from New Mexico, and four wetland plants from three miles west.
Nothing about visiting this site is published by the body that owns it, and that gap should be respected rather than filled in from a general assumption. The building's own listing, checked in August 2026, gives a street address and a telephone number and says that reservations are available and walk ins are welcome. It publishes no grounds hours, no statement about whether or when the grounds are open to the public, no visitor parking arrangement and no visitor centre. Temple grounds elsewhere in Utah are ordinarily open and the building ordinarily is not, but ordinarily is not a source and this page does not treat it as one. If you intend to walk the grounds, telephone first. If you intend to photograph the exterior, do it from the public street, which is where every element described on this page is visible from anyway. And if you are weighing a property nearby, the useful call is to the city's planning record rather than to any page about the building, including this one.
Living with it
The newest large building in a city whose other new large building is a museum room.
Set against the rest of this city, the scale of it is the striking thing. Syracuse counted 32,141 people at the 2020 census on 10.40 square miles, and it has no downtown, no shopping centre of any size and no municipal building larger than a community centre. Into that arrived a 90,526 square foot structure on twelve acres, roughly seven times the footprint of the entire museum complex and taller by a wide margin than anything else standing. A building of that size in a city of that size changes the skyline of the western half of the county, and it did so fourteen months ago.
That is why its absence from the practical city guide is worth reporting rather than glossing. That page runs to more than two thousand lines about this city, covers the lake, the causeway, the schools, the utilities and the housing stock in detail, and does not contain the word temple once. It is the single largest omission on that guide and it is a reporting finding here rather than a repair, because these companion pages describe and the city guides are edited separately. The same is true of two other things that arrived in the last fourteen months: the museum's fifth building, and a regional park that was under construction in August 2026.
For a household weighing an address, the practical questions are ordinary ones and they are all answerable at the address rather than from a page. What the street looks like at the times a large site generates arrivals and departures. Where people park when the site's own parking fills, which is a question the city's planning file answers and no public page does. How the lighting reads at night from a particular window, which is a site visit question and not a document question. And what the sight line is, given a two hundred and twenty foot spire on flat ground, which is answerable by standing in the garden.
What this page will not do, in any wording, is describe the people who use the building, how many of them there are, or what any of that implies about the streets around it. That is a fair housing line and it is absolute on this site. The building, its grounds, its materials, its dimensions, its dates and its access are the whole of the subject, and the rest of what a household signs up for at a Syracuse address is on the mover page.
The gateway itself
The Causeway
The three miles of road behind the nickname the media kit uses, and who owns them.
Read the guideThe plants in the glass
Farmington Bay and the birding
The county's managed wetlands, their access rules and their calendar, written once for all fifteen towns.
Read the guideThe other new room
The Regional Museum
Four buildings, a fifth from June 2026, and seven markers standing around the city.
Read the guideMoving here
Living on the Bluff
The watering quadrants, the one utility bill and the two sides of this city that are county ground.
The mover pageThe practical side
The Syracuse city guide
The figures half of an address, which is a different page for a different question.
Open the guideThe wider county
Davis County on The Local
Every town on this run of the lake shore, and the shared subjects written once.
The region hubKeep reading
More of Syracuse on The Local.
The road
The Causeway
Seven miles of county road, and a tollbooth standing just inside the city line.
Read the guideThe week
The Founders Park Week
Eight days in June, a six way roundabout, and the tax that paid for the park.
Read the guide1887
The Bathing Resort
A railroad built to reach a beach, and a lake that took the beach back by 1891.
Read the guideThe museum
The Regional Museum
Four buildings, a fifth opened in June, and seven markers standing around town.
Read the guideThe harvest
Black Island Farms
Eight acres of maze, four more of them haunted, on the flat ground west of town.
Read the guideMoving here
Living on the Bluff
A hundred and twenty feet of fall across four miles, and a road that follows it.
Read the guideThe companion
Syracuse, in full
A county road west, a tollbooth inside the city line, and a town selling the trip since 1887.
Read the pageQuick answers
The temple, answered.
The Church's own media kit gives a building size of 90,526 square feet on a property of 12.268 acres, with a height to the top of the spire of 219 feet 8 inches. For scale, that is roughly seven times the footprint of the whole Syracuse Regional Museum complex and taller than anything else standing in the city. The ground under the site reads about 4,281 feet on the United States Geological Survey elevation service, which puts the tip of the spire at roughly 4,500 feet above sea level, about a hundred and fifty feet above the highest natural ground measured anywhere inside the city limits.
On 8 June 2025, after a public open house that ran from 10 to 31 May 2025. The full sequence in the media kit is: announced 5 April 2020, groundbreaking 12 June 2021, open house 10 to 31 May 2025, dedication 8 June 2025. Both the open house and the dedication are in the past, so this is a permanent building rather than a forthcoming one. The practical city guide for this city on this site does not mention the building at all, which is the largest omission on that page.
A steel frame with a White Moncini granite exterior, according to the Church's own media kit. The exterior stone was fabricated by Campolonghi of Montignoso, Italy, and installed by IMS Masonry of Lindon, Utah. The art glass was designed by Architectural Nexus with assistance from Holdman Studios, fabricated by Progetto Arte Poli of Verona, Italy, and installed by Steel Encounters, and features faceted crystal in blue, yellow, green, red, orange and white. Terra cotta elements came from Syzygy Tile of Silver City, New Mexico, installed by Peritia Stone.
Architectural Nexus was the architect. The interior design was by Robert McArthur Studios with Architectural Nexus. The contractor was Wadman Corporation. Those are the credits in the Church's own media kit, checked in August 2026, along with named fabricators and installers for the exterior stone, the art glass and the terra cotta. The same document describes the fencing as a metal fence with precast columns along the street and painted precast along the sides and back, and the walkways as concrete with surface retarder, an etched finish and manufactured stone pavers.
Because the design references the lake three miles west, and the Church says so in print. The media kit describes design motifs that include representations of the local flora around the Great Salt Lake and nearby wetlands, naming the snowball sand verbena, the desert paintbrush, the common cattail and reeds. It explains the transitioning greens, blues and yellows in the art glass as representative of the reflections of the lake, because the community is considered the gateway to Antelope Island. Three of the four named species are shoreline and wetland plants.
The issuing body does not publish an answer, and this page will not supply one. The building's own listing, checked in August 2026, carries a street address and a telephone number and a line saying that reservations are available and walk ins are welcome. It publishes no grounds hours, no statement about whether the grounds are open, no visitor parking arrangement and no visitor centre. The practical instruction is to ring the number on that listing before making a trip. The exterior elements described on this page are all visible from the public street in any case.
At 1098 South 2500 West, Syracuse, Utah 84075, which geocodes inside the city limits. It is about a mile and a half northwest of City Hall at 1979 West 1900 South, four or five minutes to drive, and that is an estimate rather than a published figure. 2500 West is a north south residential collector rather than an arterial; it carries no state route number and no traffic count station, which distinguishes it from Antelope Drive a few blocks south, where the Utah Department of Transportation's 2024 counts range from 3,000 a day at the west end to 28,000 at the 2000 West junction.
There will be, and nothing from it is repeated here. A twelve acre site on a residential collector goes through a City of Syracuse Planning Commission and City Council process that produces a site plan, any conditional use approval, a traffic study and landscaping conditions, and that file is the only place the actual conditions of the approval are written down. The city's agenda and minutes archive is public and the file will be indexed by the site address. For anybody weighing a street within a few blocks, that record is a better source than any description of the building.
Anything about the people. This companion describes buildings, grounds, materials, dimensions, dates, consultants, access and parking, and it says nothing about who attends, how many do, how often, or what any of that might imply about the streets nearby. That is a fair housing line and it is absolute across this site, and it applies in the same way to every temple page in this region. What it leaves is a great deal: a fully documented specification, four named plant species in the design, a supply chain across two continents, and a spire on flat ground that can be seen from most of the western half of the city.
Ninety thousand square feet and four plants from the water three miles west.
The most interesting thing about this building is not its size, it is that somebody designing it looked west. The stone came from Tuscany and the glass from Verona, and the palette and the plant motifs came from a shoreline you can drive to in seven minutes, because the document that describes the design says so in the community's own nickname. That is a rare thing for a large suburban building anywhere and it makes this the one structure in the county that treats the lake as a subject. If you are weighing an address in the western half of this city, the questions worth asking are what the sight lines are, what the collector road does at the hours a large site generates traffic, and what the city's own planning file says about the conditions. Tell me what you are looking at and I will introduce you to a Davis County partner agent who works these streets, and stay on the file for the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.