Beehive and Portico

by John S. Tanner

A beehive adorns the roof of the Maeser Building.  It is a conspicuous feature of the building if you approach the upper campus from the west, the way BYU was originally laid out.  As you come up the hill, you will see a carved beehive perched atop the Maeser Building’s columned portico.  This stone beehive capped the original front porch of campus.  A symbol of Deseret, it served as a visible reminder of BYU’s pioneer past and LDS identity. 

The beehive sits atop an otherwise neoclassical building, whose architectural vocabulary was intended to evoke such classical ideals as reason, harmony, authority, tradition, culture, and learning.  The design for the Maeser Building ultimately recalls ancient Greek temples.  It was built during the Neoclassical Revival period, a few years before the Lincoln Memorial.  The original plan for the Maeser quad was loosely inspired by Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia, only BYU’s quad was to be graced by a temple opposite the Maeser Building. 

To learn more about this history, I encourage you to visit the display “Designing BYU” on the first floor of the HBLL, as I did last Saturday.  For links to video clips from the exhibit showing the original plan for the Maeser Memorial Building click here. (video clip)

After visiting the exhibit, I decided to walk around south campus.  My walk took me past the site of the home I lived in during my freshman year, now torn down and replaced with a lovely terraced garden.  It was here, in the precincts of the Maeser Building, that college awakened me to the world of ideas.  I used to like to study on the hillside, pleased to be in the historic part of campus near a building whose Doric columns and elegant architrave looked traditionally collegiate.  Later I would teach Civ courses in a building whose design bespoke the ideals of Western civilization.

The Maeser Building was also the site of early spiritual experiences.  As I walked the once familiar path from my old home to the Maeser Building, my memory turned back to a Fast Sunday in the spring of my freshman year.  I was wrestling with the decision to serve a mission.   I prayed as I walked the grounds, feeling the weight of a decision I knew was about much more than two years.  It was about eternity.  There, in the shadow of a stone beehive, I determined to stand in holy places and say, “This I believe.  Here I stand.”

To me, this juxtaposition of a beehive atop a classical entablature serves as a visual reminder of BYU’s dual heritage and mission.   The neoclassical design reminds me that BYU belongs within a venerable academic tradition stretching back to antiquity.  We have received from ancient Athens and medieval Europe the idea of a university, just as we have inherited the elements comprising the Maeser’s neoclassical design.  The beehive reminds me that BYU also belongs within a specifically LDS heritage.  We are the beneficiaries of founders who, out of their poverty and through their industry, established a house of learning in the desert at the behest of prophets and inspired by belief that God expects us to seek learning “by study and also by faith.”  We who labor here “have a double heritage which [we] must pass along: the secular knowledge that history has washed to the feet of mankind with the new knowledge brought by scholarly research–but also the vital and revealed truths that have been sent to us from heaven” (Spencer W. Kimball, Second-Century Address).

It is our duty, President Kimball continues, to become fully “bilingual,” speaking with “authority and excellence” the language of scholarship while becoming deeply “literate in the language of spiritual things.”  Some doubt that BYU can do both well.  These doubts are not new.  Long ago Tertullian famously quipped “What indeed does Athens have to do with Jerusalem, or the academy with the church?”  You provide tangible evidence that reason and revelation, study and faith, scholarship and sanctity can comfortably cohere in the souls of disciplined disciples.  In humility, may we embrace our dual legacy, symbolized by a stone beehive atop a columned portico.

© 2008 BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.