Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House is a World Heritage-listed building on Bennelong Point, a promontory on the south side of Sydney Harbour in New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon and is regarded as a breakthrough in modern architecture that tested the limits of engineering and construction. It is also one of the world's busiest performing arts centres.

Tubowgule was a rocky point at the end of a long ridge, and the nearby harbour, freshwater creek and mud flats made the area rich in oysters, mussels, fish and game. It was a place for ceremony, gathering and celebration in Aboriginal Australia and has always reflected the society tucked in around Sydney Cove. The point was formerly called Tubow-gule, a name recorded in various spellings, and it became known as Bennelong's Point.

British colonists arriving in 1788 used Tubowgule to hold their cattle and horses, renaming it Cattle Point before crushing Aboriginal middens into lime and calling it Limeburners' Point. Bennelong Point is named for Woollarawarre Bennelong, a Wangal man kidnapped by Governor Arthur Phillip who served as an intermediary between the Eora and the British. Bennelong solicited the government to build him a hut at the eastern point of the cove, and the brick hut, twelve feet square and roofed with tiles, was completed in November 1790 and is illustrated in a painting by Thomas Watling.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie ordered a fort on Bennelong Point in 1817 under architect and former convict Francis Greenway, and Fort Macquarie was completed in 1821 with a castellated square tower.

The push for an opera house in Sydney gathered force through the advocacy of Sir Eugene Goossens, who arrived in the city in 1947 to conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Joseph Cahill, a former railway worker who became NSW Premier in 1952, had promised an opera house for Sydney and convened a conference in 1954 to build support for the idea.

In 1956 the state government sponsored an international competition for a design with two halls, and architects from some 30 countries submitted 233 entries. In January 1957 the judging committee announced that the winning entry was that of Danish architect Jørn Utzon. On 29 January 1957 Premier Cahill announced that Design 218 by Jørn Utzon had won the competition, and the assessors believed it could become one of the great buildings of the world.

Ove Arup & Partners served as consulting structural engineer for the project.

The roof shells, with their vaulted concrete ribs, were built from precast concrete segments fixed together with epoxy resin and held together by pre-stressing tendons. The installation of the last and 2,194th precast shell segment on 17 January 1967 effectively completed Stage 2 of the works, after which construction of the glass walls and interiors got under way.

The exterior shell of the Sydney Opera House is clad in a ceramic tile developed specifically for the building, the Sydney Tile, a 120mm square produced over three years of work by the Swedish firm Höganäs. The tile is made from clay combined with crushed stone. Its off-white surface, drawn from the Swedish Höganäs tradition, was inspired by the Chinese ceramic tradition. In total, 1,056,006 ceramic tiles were prefabricated and bonded onto the ribbed superstructure.

Construction began on 2 March 1959, marked by a ceremony held in the rain at which the NSW Premier Joseph Cahill screwed a bronze plaque into place. Bennelong Point proved to be loose alluvial deposits permeated with seawater rather than solid Hawkesbury sandstone, so some 700 steel-cased concrete shafts were bored into the site. From March 1959 the Podium rose on Bennelong Point as the largest concrete structure in the southern hemisphere, and Stage One was completed in February 1963 two years behind schedule.

Under the Monumental Steps, the single span concrete beams, some 49m long, were proposed by the engineer Ove Arup in place of the columns that Utzon's sketches had suggested.

Utzon resigned from the project on 28 February 1966 amid rising construction costs, and despite a 3000-signature protest the government appointed three Australian architects, Peter Hall, David Littlemore and Lionel Todd, to finish it.

There were no working drawings from Utzon, only sketches and designs, and about 5000 sketches and drawings placed in storage by his office assistant Bill Wheatland remained largely unseen until 1972 and were not available to the architects.

Olsen's mural Salute to Five Bells took shape in an old wool store in the Rocks and was unveiled in 1973 in the Northern Foyer of the Concert Hall.

The first production staged in the Opera Hall was Prokofiev's epic War and Peace, performed by the Australian Opera on 28 September 1973, almost a month before the Queen's official opening. On the following night Charles Mackerras conducted the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall.

The building itself comprises three groups of interlocking vaulted shells, which roof two main performance halls and a restaurant.

The Sydney Opera House is a multipurpose performing arts facility whose performance venues are the Concert Hall, the Opera Theatre and the Grand Organ.^{2Sydney Opera House · Encyclopaedia Britannica ↗} The Grand Organ is believed to be the largest mechanical action organ in the world and was designed and built by Ronald Sharp of Sydney, completed in 1979 after partial construction in a small factory in Mortdale.^{14Preserving the Grand Organ · Sydney Opera House Trust ↗}

The Bennelong Point site has been a place for feasting and celebrating for millennia, and the Opera House carries that tradition from the stage onto the plate. Dining at the Opera House ranges from breakfast at Winnie's and a long lunch at Opera Bar to pre-theatre meals at Midden by Mark Olive and a show-stopper meal at Bennelong.

Badu Gili was launched in 2017 and projected First Nations artists onto the Bennelong sails, attracting more than 16,000 visitors in its first month.

The Sydney Opera House was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List on 28 June 2007, and now stands alongside landmarks such as the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China. The listing rests on criterion (i), which identifies the building as a great architectural work of the 20th century. The inscribed property is a great urban sculpture set in a remarkable waterscape, at the tip of a peninsula projecting into Sydney Harbour, and it has had an enduring influence on architecture. Its coordinates are S33 51 24 and E151 12 55.

Jørn Utzon agreed in 1999 to develop guidelines for future changes to the building, resulting in the Utzon Design Principles, which protect the original vision and architectural integrity of the design. In September 2004 the Reception Hall reopened as the Utzon Room in Utzon's honour, featuring a 14-metre long floor-to-ceiling woollen tapestry that he also designed.

In April 2022 Engineering Heritage Australia awarded the building an Engineering Heritage International Marker, describing it as one of the most recognisable in the world and calling for engineering of the highest calibre.

The Decade of Renewal was an almost $300 million program funded by the NSW Government, the largest capital works program since 1973, and it culminated in the Concert Hall reopening in July 2022 after a once-in-a-generation upgrade.

Planning changes lift the maximum capacity for low and medium scale outdoor events from 5,000 to 6,000 people, and raise the Southern Forecourt limit from 6,000 to 7,000 for major concerts. The same planning package allows community facilities such as town halls to host pop-up events without a development application, and makes it easier to convert empty shops into small licensed venues.

• 1955
  Bennelong Point declared the site
  Bennelong Point was declared the site for the proposed new opera house.^{6Jørn Utzon AC · Sydney Opera House Trust ↗}
• 1956
  International competition released
  Premier Cahill released an international competition the following year, with guidelines contained in a 25-page booklet known as the Brown Book.^{6Jørn Utzon AC · Sydney Opera House Trust ↗}
• 29 January 1957
  Design 218 announced as winner
  Premier Cahill announced that Design 218 by Jørn Utzon had won the competition.^{6Jørn Utzon AC · Sydney Opera House Trust ↗}