Encyclopedia
The
Sydney Opera House is located in
Sydney,
New South Wales,
Australia. It is one of the most distinctive and famous
20th century buildings, and one of the most famous
performing arts venues in the world. Situated on
Bennelong Point in
Sydney Harbour, with parkland to its south and close to the equally famous
Sydney Harbour Bridge, the building and its surroundings form an iconic Australian image. To some, the spherical-sectioned
shells are reminiscent of the flotilla of sailboats commonly cruising there. It is a major tourist attraction even though most visitors have little interest in attending performances.
As well as many touring theatre,
ballet, and musical productions, the Opera House is the home of Opera Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company and the
Sydney Symphony Orchestra. It is administered by the Opera House Trust, under the New South Wales Ministry of the Arts.
Description
The Opera House covers 1.8 hectares of land. It is 183 metres long and about 120 metres wide at its widest point. It is supported on 580 concrete piers sunk up to 25 metres below sea level. Its power supply is equivalent for a town of 25,000 people. The power is distributed by 645 kilometres of electrical cable.
The roofs of the House are constructed of 1.056 million glossy white and matt cream Swedish-made tiles. Despite their self-cleaning nature, they are still subject to periodic maintenance and replacement.
Performance venues and facilities
The Sydney Opera House contains five theatres, five rehearsal studios, two main halls, four restaurants, six bars and numerous souvenir shops.
The building's interior is composed of pink granite mined from Tarana, NSW and
wood and brush box
plywood supplied from northern
NSW.
The theatres are in a series of large shells, conceived by dissecting a hemisphere. The Concert Hall and Opera Theatre are each contained in the two largest groups of shells, and the other theatres are located on the sides of the shell groupings. A much smaller group of shells set to one side of the Monumental steps and houses the Bennelong Restaurant.
The five theatres making up the performance facilities:
- The Concert Hall, with 2,679 seats, contains the Sydney Opera House Grand Organ, the largest mechanical tracker action organ in the world with over 10,000 pipes.
- The Opera Theatre, with 1,547 seats, is the main performance space for Opera Australia; it is also used by the Australian Ballet Company.
- The Drama Theatre, with 544 seats
- The Playhouse, with 398 seats
- The Studio Theatre, with 364 seats
History
Origins
Planning for the Sydney Opera House began in the late 1940s when
Eugene Goossens, the Director of the NSW State
Conservatorium of Music, lobbied for a suitable venue for large theatrical productions. At the time, the normal venue for such productions was the
Sydney Town Hall, but this venue was not large enough. By 1954, Goossens succeeded in gaining the support of NSW Premier
Joseph Cahill, who called for designs for a dedicated opera house.
It was also Goossens who insisted that Bennelong Point be the site for the Opera House. Cahill had wanted it to be on or near the Wynyard Railway Station, located in the north-western Sydney CBD.
The competition that Cahill organised received 233 entries. The basic design that was finally accepted in 1955 was submitted by
Jørn Utzon, a Danish architect. Utzon arrived in Sydney in 1957 to help supervise the .
Utzon and construction of the Opera House
The
Fort Macquarie Tram Depot, occupying the site at the time of these plans, was demolished in 1958, and formal construction of the Opera House began in March, 1959. The project was built in three stages. Stage I consisted of building the upper podium. Stage II saw the construction of the outer shells. Stage III consisted of the interior design and construction .
Stage I commenced on December 5, 1958, by the construction firm
Civil & Civic. The government had pushed for work to begin early fearing that funding, or public opinion, might turn against them. However major structural issues still plagued the design .
By January 23, 1961, work was running 47 weeks behind, mainly due to unexpected difficulties . Work on the podium was finally completed on August 31, 1962.
Stage II, the
shells were originally designed as a series of parabolas, however engineers
Ove Arup and partners had not been able to find an acceptable solution to constructing them. In mid 1961 Utzon handed the engineers his solution to the problem, the shells all being created as ribs from a sphere of the same radius. This not only satisfied the engineers, and cut down the project time drastically from what it could have been , but also created the wonderful shapes so instantly recognisable today.
Ove Arup and partners supervised the construction of the shells, estimating on April 6, 1962 that it would be completed between August 1964 and March 1965. By the end of 1965, the estimated finish for stage II was July 1967.
Stage III, the interiors, started with Utzon moving his entire office to Sydney in February 1963. However, there was a change of government in 1965, and the new
Robert Askin government declared that the project under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Works. In October 1965, Utzon gave the Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes, a schedule setting out the completion dates of parts of his work for stage III. Significantly, Hughes withheld permission for the construction of plywood prototypes for the interiors . This eventually forced Utzon to leave the project on February 28, 1966. He said that Hughes' refusal to pay Utzon any fees and the lack of collaboration caused his resignation, and later famously described the situation as "Malice in Blunderland". In March 1966, Hughes offered him a reduced role as 'design architect', under a panel of executive architects, without any supervisory powers over the House's construction but Utzon rejected this.
The cost of the project, even in October of that year, was still only $22.9 million, less than a quarter of the final cost.
Construction after Utzon
The second stage of construction was still in process when Utzon was forced to resign. His position was principally taken over by Peter Hall, who became largely responsible for the interior design. Other persons appointed that same year to replace Utzon were E.H. Farmer as government architect, D.S. Littlemore and Lionel Todd.
The four significant changes to the design after Utzon left were:
- The cladding to the podium and the paving
- The construction of the glass walls
- Use of the halls
- The interior designs: Utzon's plywood corridor designs, and his acoustic and seating designs for the interior of both halls, were scrapped completely. More importantly Utzon considered acoustics from the start of design. These designs were subsequently modelled and found to be acoustically perfect. As such the current internal organization is sub-optimal. The plastic rings that hang from the ceiling in the concert hall are intended to improve acoustics. Under Utzon's original design they would have not been needed.
The Opera House was formally completed in 1973, at a cost of $102 million. The original cost estimate in 1957 was £3,500,000 . The original completion date set by the government was January 26, 1963.
Consequences for Utzon – and for world architecture
In an article in Harvard Design Magazine in 2005 , professor Bent Flyvbjerg argues that Utzon fell victim to a politically lowballed construction budget, which eventually resulted in a cost overrun of 1,400 percent. The overrun and the scandal it created kept Utzon from building more masterpieces. This, according to Flyvbjerg, is the real cost of the Sydney Opera House.
Opening
The Opera House was formally opened by
Queen Elizabeth II, in her capacity as
Queen of Australia, on October 20, 1973, which crowds of millions attended. The opening was televised and included fireworks and a performance of
Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.
Prior to the opening, two performances had already taken place in the finished building. On September 28, 1973, a performance of
Sergei Prokofiev's
War and Peace is an epic novel [i] by Leo Tolstoy [i], first published from 1865 [i] to 1869 [i] in ...
was played at the Opera Theatre. On September 29, the first public concert in the Concert Hall took place. It was performed by the
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Mackerras and with accompanying singer
Birgit Nilsson.
During the construction of the Opera House, a number of lunchtime performances were arranged for the workers, with
Paul Robeson the first artist to perform at the Opera House in 1960.
After opening
By 1975, the substantial construction bill for the Opera House had been finally paid off, largely through a public lottery system.
The House has been subject to some additions and improvements since its opening in 1973. The
pipe organ in the Concert Hall was not completed until 1979. In 1988, a two-level walkway along the western side of Bennelong Point was added as part of Australia's bicentenary celebrations. In 1999, a fifth theatre, the Playhouse, was added to the Opera House.
Following an arrangement made in 1999, plans were made to change Hall's internal design of the Opera House to that of Utzon's. The redesign involves the house's reception hall and opera theatre, and will be supervised by Utzon. As Utzon is too old to travel by plane, he undertook the supervision from his home in
Majorca. Allowances will be made for modern day technology and requirements. In September 2004, the redesign of the Reception Hall of the opera house was completed, but is now only rarely available for public inspection.
The
colonnade, a
loggia along the western side was begun in 2004 and completed in 2006.
It was the first external change to the building since opening in 1973. Through its windows the bridge can be seen from the foyers of the three western venues. The architects were Jørn and Jan Utzon of Utzon Architects, and Richard Johnson of Johnson Pilton Walker.
The Opera Theatre has long been criticized as too small and some conductors seek to have it expanded, including Richard Hickox and Nicolette Fraillon. The cost of this
has been estimated at $750 million.
The orchestra pit is considered hazardous for the occupational
health of musicians performing there .
In the meantime, transparent baffles are used to protect the hearing of string players from
the brass instruments immediately behind them, and the number of hours musicians are permitted
in the pit is limited according to computer-based models of the loudness at their individual positions.
The stage is considerably smaller than its counterpart in
Melbourne at the
Victorian Arts Centre; this also limits the Australian Ballet Company. Large productions have been occasionally performed in the Concert Hall, which Opera Australia uses routinely for performances in concert.
The exterior on the public stage
In 1997,
French urban climber,
Alain "Spiderman" Robert, using only his bare hands and feet and with no safety devices, scaled the building's exterior wall all the way to the top.
It received attention during
Sydney 2000 Olympics. It was included in the Olympic Torch route to the Olympic stadium, and involved Australian swimmer Samantha Riley standing on top of the Opera House waving the Olympic torch. It was the backdrop of some Olympic events, including the triathlon—which began at the Opera House—and the yachting events on Sydney Harbour.
Security at the Opera House has increased as the result of the likelihood of it attracting attention of terrorists in the post September 11 era. This security did not prevent two anti-war activists in March 2003 climbing to the top of the highest sail and painting "NO WAR" in massive red letters. The pair, David Burgess and Will Saunders, were arrested and sentenced in January 2004 to nine months of periodic detention for malicious damage and ordered to pay $151,000 in clean-up costs to the Opera House Trust for daubing their anti-war slogan.
In popular culture
The Sydney Opera House have been used as icons for the city of Sydney, such as:
...
Australian Football League team.
- The logo of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
- Appearances in the films Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, , , Godzilla, Supernova, , , Independence Day, Little Einsteins, Our Lips Are Sealed, Finding Nemo is an Academy Award [i]-winning computer-animated [i] ...
, and in the television series The Simpsons is an Emmy [i] and Peabody [i]-winning American [i] animated [i] ...
and Inspector Morse.
Further reading
- Hubble, Ava, The Strange Case of Eugene Goossens and Other Tales from The Opera House, Collins Publishers, Australia, 1988. .
- John, Alan and Watkins, Dennis, The Story of the Opera House is told in an opera called The Eighth Wonder
- Duek-Cohen, Elias, Utzon and the Sydney Opera House, Morgan Publications, Sydney, 1967-1998.
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See also
External links
- .
- — an excellent Flash-based tour of the House.
