Sydney Opera House - Icon of Australia

In 1955, Bennelong Point was declared the site for the proposed new opera house. In 1956, Premier Cahill released an international competition for "a National Opera House at Bennelong Point." The competition fee was 10 Australian pounds. 10 dollars in 1956 are equivalent to 201.06 dollars in 2023 and so 10 Australian pounds would have been $400. (inflationtool.com )

A Danish architect, Jørn Utzon AC, created his entry from his modest office in Hellenbaek, north of Copenhagen and sent 12 drawings. His was one of 223 entries received from 28 countries. Utzon AC's design was chosen for its originality and controversial nature.

The innovative design is a complex that offers two main halls, situated side by side, facing out to the harbour on a large area that now hosts outdoor concerts. On the top of each hall is a row of sail-shaped panels that serve as a roof and wall. The intention was to create this innovative structure from precast concrete. The largest venue of the multipurpose performing arts facility is the 2,679-seat Concert Hall, and it is a magical space where large audiences patronise choir performances, symphony concerts, and popular music shows. There is an Opera Theatre for opera and dance performances, including ballet. Joan Sutherland will always be remembered as Australia's operatic soprano, so this building became The Joan Sutherland Theatre as a tribute to her in 2012. It can house 1,500 people. There are spaces for stage plays, film screenings, and smaller musical performances. On the southeastern end of the Opera House, there is a space where outdoor performances happen, and this idea of creating art outside the Opera House becomes attractive when the Vivid Festival takes hold of the imagination of music and art lovers worldwide. Restaurants and a professional recording studio cater to this festival atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, The Opera House became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007.

  The roof design for the Sydney Opera House evolved through various iterations as Utzon and his team pursued parabolic, ellipsoid and finally spherical geometry to derive the final form of the shells. The eventual realisation that the form of the Sydney Opera House's shells could be derived from the surface of a sphere marked a milestone in 20th century architecture. The Spherical Solution

Let's break that down........

Think back to the Greeks and their Greek columns, without mortar the columns were manipulated to support the whole structure. Very tricky.

The Sydney Opera House was also tricky to design and tricky to build. And the tricky nature of achieving an outlandish idea was quite controversial at the time. 

The Spherical Solution

   Matters began to turn against Utzon in 1962. His Spherical Solution for the roof had been              approved but the cost of the building – estimated at just 3.5 million pounds when construction      began in 1959 – was increasing. By the middle of 1962, the estimated cost had hit 13.7 million pounds. Read more here...Utzon Departs the House

     You can see the light installations above. 

 Vivid Sydney is an annual celebration of creativity, innovation and technology, transforming Sydney for 23 days and nights. The idea behind the Festival is to fuse art, innovation and technology in collaboration with some of our time's most boundary-pushing artists, thinkers, musicians and culinary experts. This iconic Vivid Festival began in 2009, and the most recent Vivid Festival in 2023 had an audience reach of 3.28 million. The Vivid Festival concept was created and is managed and produced by Destination NSW, the NSW Government's tourism and major events agency.

Shanon Steele @ Opera on the Harbour

During this conversation, Joyce Steele from Canberra said,

   It is about beauty too. All a bit overwhelming. The best one was when we went on a cruise and         saw it from the water. You miss some of the stuff that isn’t on Circular Quay but it was much more     pleasant and relaxed.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (Accessed Dec. 2023) Sydney Opera House.      https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sydney-Opera-House

Inflationtool.com

The Sydney Opera House. (Accessed Dec. 2023) Our story Jørn Utzon AC. https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/our-story/jorn-utzon

Vivid Sydney (About) (Accessed Dec. 2023). About Vivid Sydney. https://www.vividsydney.com/info/about-vivid-sydney

Wikipedia (Accessed Dec. 2023) Vivid Sydney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivid_Sydney