Sydney Opera House
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How it came to be
In the late 1940s Eugene Goossens, chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, began lobbying for a proper venue for opera and orchestral music. By 1954 he had won the support of the New South Wales premier, Joseph Cahill, and it was Goossens who insisted on Bennelong Point as the site. An international design competition launched on 13 September 1955 drew 233 entries from 32 countries.
On 29 January 1957 the Danish architect Jørn Utzon was named the winner. Work began in March 1959 before anyone knew how to build the shell roofs, and the team tried at least 12 forms before finding, in mid-1961, the solution of cutting every shell from the same sphere. The roof is made of 2,194 precast concrete sections, faced with 1,056,006 tiles made by the Swedish firm Höganäs.
After a change of state government in 1965, disputes over cost and schedule deepened, and Utzon resigned in 1966. An Australian team led by Peter Hall completed the interiors, and Queen Elizabeth II opened the building on 20 October 1973. The 1957 estimate had been 3.5 million pounds (7 million dollars), and the final cost was 102 million dollars. Utzon died in 2008 without ever having seen the finished building, which was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2007.
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