The Opera Tour

After lunch we took the official tour of the Sydney Opera House, which involves a bit of admiring the outside and lots of admiring the inside and a few little films projected onto the walls.

The idea for an opera house at Bennelong point was first dreamed up in the 1950s. The NSW state government ran a competition to come up with a design. Most of the entries were pretty bog standard rectangular buildings but just as they were about to choose a winner, a new judge came onto the panel and went back through the designs that had already been discarded. From these he came up with the design submitted by a Danish architect called Urtzon and said "gentlemen, here's your winner". Problem was, Urtzon's design submission was just a rough sketch, like something from a dream you've remembered in the morning, so the details of how they'd actually build it weren't clear.

The Urtzon design was a bit controversial at first but the public soon came round to the idea and building work began in 1959, with a completion date scheduled within three years at a cost of $7 million. And that was when it all started to go wrong, because the engineers couldn't get the thing right and before long it had gone over budget and was running years behind schedule. In the end it took fourteen years to build, completing in 1973, at a cost of $106 million. You think I'm good at spending money, Urtzon was a genius.

Anyway, unhappily Urtzon fell out with the government over the problems with the building and the cost and eventually he went back to Denmark before the building was completed, leaving some Australian firm to finish the job. He's never been back, so despite having designed it, he's never seen the finished work and now he's 89 I don't suppose he ever will.

The roof is composed by over a million Swedish ceramic tiles. The glass is French. The designer was Danish and the money probably came from Britain. A European building if ever I saw one. Reckon I'll get it in my hand luggage?