How the Sydney Opera House changed the world of architecture

If you take one look at this building, odds are you know it's the Sydney Opera House. And if you know one story about how the Sydney Opera House was built, it probably features this person. In 1957, the Danish architect Jørn Utzon, at the time little known outside of his country, won the competition for a new opera in Sydney. The new building was to be erected at Bennelong Point, or Tubagul, the name of the land as known by its traditional custodians, the Gadigal of the Eora nation. What made Utzon stand out among over 200 other projects was the idea of the now iconic shelves at the top of the building. And it was a beautiful idea, but it then needed a lot of engineering help to make it actually work, to make it stand up and to make it buildable. That's to put it lightly. The complex sails that the Opera House is most famous for were the reason why Utzon's project won the competition in the first place. But they were also nearly impossible to build. To overcome the challenges of his design, Jørn Utzon hired Danish-British engineer Ove Arup and his team and Australian contractor Manuel Horniburg. Figuring out how to build Utzon's complex shapes turned into what architecture writer Peter Murray would call the saga of the Sydney Opera House. A building process that cost way more than planned, took nearly a decade longer than the initial agreement, angered politicians, and ultimately led to Utzon's resignation from the project. But this is not the story we're telling today. The political drama around the building covered up completely the investigation, a depreciation of the technical advancement that happened outside. A lot has been written about the things that went wrong. So today we're going to look at the things that went right, and the incredible human ingenuity that brought the innovative idea to life and, in more than one way, changed architecture. I think there are five ways that the Sydney Opera House changed the world, if you like, the world of construction, design and construction. So the first is the use of computers. You know, until the Sydney Opera House, we did everything by hand. The concrete ribbed arches that make up the sails in particular are a very difficult structure to analyse or calculate. So during the design, we used digital computers for the first time in a major building, but they were reused again, or we used them again during the construction. So as these pieces of concrete are put in place, the knuckles of my finger, you also had to check that each one was accurate, that we weren't building a building like this, or a building like this, or a building like this. So actually, at the end of every day, a surveyor would measure everything with a theodolite that measures angles. And then all the measurements were sent overnight to the computer at Sydney University, where they would compute whether it was now, that piece was in the right place or not. The next morning, small adjustments could be made before the next pieces were added. So it was a daily sort of check on the geometry, so that in the end, it ended up the perfect shape. So this was the first major change. The second is the way it was built. It was built using a manufacturing process. So we manufactured pieces and then assembled them on site. And even today, that's referred to as modern methods of construction, but the Sydney Opera House put them into practice 50 years ago. But it wasn't just the construction of the stails. The main glass walls at the front of the building or the ends of the building are made out of laminated glass, a type of safety glass. First time it was ever used in buildings. So all these things, the use of epoxy, the use of ceramics, the use of laminated glass, all these had to be diligently and thoroughly researched and tested. But it's just the courage, I think, of people to set out, to decide, to look at something new and then put it into practice and use it, I think was incredible. Perhaps even more importantly, the completion of the Sydney Opera House led to a rethinking of the way architects, engineers and contractors worked together. When you design and build a building, generally the different people and different actors that contribute to the completion of the building start in different phases. So at the beginning, you have the architect with a concept or a developed design, and then all the other actors as such, the structural engineers or the mechanical engineers start developing that design in order to make it buildable. And then finally, in the final stage, there is the contractor, the general contractor, who actually build the building. Now, what happens with the Sydney Opera House, we have an integration of all the actors, architects, general contractors and structural engineers right at the beginning of the process. And this is one of the first examples of what we call today integrated design. This kind of collaboration was later applied to the creation of other complex buildings, like the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Lloyds Building in London. And while the relationship between the Opera House's architects and engineers is way more documented, the discovery of the contractor's role is very new. In what they call the untold Australian contribution in the making of the Sydney Opera House, Luciano and his colleagues have been researching Hornibrook's work on the project by analysing over 5,000 previously overlooked drawings in the different stages of the building's construction. To them, Hornibrook's close involvement in the creation of the Sydney Opera House bears a greater meaning. The most important aspect of our research findings is the sense of belonging, that this building was not just a product of foreign knowledge or foreign creativity. We finally put on the map the Australian know-how. And not only we demonstrated that Australia was ready to build such an icon, such a complex building, but also thanks to the archival material, the ingenuity of this solution. They are second to none, especially in the 1960s. Half a century after its completion, the Sydney Opera House has already left a lot of marks on architecture, engineering and construction across the world. But the most important one comes down to the very reason buildings exist in the first place. To enhance the human experience. The land the Sydney Opera House was built on has been a gathering site for First Nations people for centuries. The Opera House has continued that tradition, becoming a hub for culture, arts and people, and playing a role in histories, both collective and personal. At the end of the Opera House, there's a bit of a boardwalk sticking out into the harbour, and I was sitting there marvelling at this building that I heard all about and seeing it for the first time. And at the same time, one of the America's Cup yachts came past. I really thought I'd, you know, I got to heaven somehow.