Ordinance room
The first building to have ordinance rooms, designed to conduct the Endowment, was Joseph Smith's store in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1842.
Using canvas, Smith divided the store's large, second-floor room into "departments," which represented "the interior of a temple as much as circumstances would permit" (Anderson & Bergera, Quorum of Anointed, 2).
After conducting the endowment services, Smith told Brigham Young, "This is not arranged right but we have done the best we could under the circumstances in which we are placed."
After Smith's death in 1844, Young also used canvas to divide the large attic room in the Nauvoo Temple in the departments.
The above arrangement for administering the Endowment consisted of only temporary modifications to a building's interior rooms; obviously canvas partitions were not meant to be permanent.
Apparently, the rooms were later made more permanent in 1881, when a group of Utah artists painted murals on the walls (O'Brien, 14–15).
Beginning with the creation, the endowment reviews man's mortal existence, and what one must do in order to return to God's presence as husband and wife with their children.
This room generally has "murals on the walls [which] are subdued in tones, and depict scenes representative of the creation of the earth" as recorded in Genesis.
The murals depict scenes such as "sylvan grottos and mossy dells, lakelets and brooks, waterfalls and rivulets, trees, vines and flowers, insects, birds and beasts, in short, the earth beautiful, as it was before the Fall of Adam and Eve.
The "rocks are rent and riven" with "gnarled trees, misshapen, and blasted; shrubs maintain a precarious roothold in rocky clefts; thorns, thistles, cacti, and noxious weeds abound," and the animals depicted "are living under the ever-present menace of death" The scenes depicts the "lone and dreary world," where Adam and Eve "[have] been driven out to meet contention, to struggle with difficulties, [and] to live by strife and sweat" in a "fallen world."
Its appointments "combine richness and simplicity," often including elaborately framed mirrors and paintings, and crystal chandeliers.
Instead of theater-style seating for instruction it has tables with floral arrangements as well as comfortable sofas and chairs (Talmadge, 207–209).
Thus, the Celestial Room is a quiet and reverent place, where individuals may pause to pray, read the scriptures, and discuss amongst themselves.
In this room "is solemnized the sacred ordinance of marriage between the parties who come to plight their vows of marital fidelity for time and eternity" (Talmage, 208–209).
Its doorway "corresponds to the inner curtain or veil that shielded from public view the most sacred precincts" of earlier temples.
