Vladimir The Sydney Opera House: How the World’s Most Recognizable Theatre Was Built
On October 20, 1973, Queen Elizabeth II opened the Sydney Opera House, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sounded in the hall. The most recognizable building in the world took four times longer to build than planned, its architect never saw it finished, and the first opera on the new stage was a Russian one: Prokofiev’s War and Peace.
The story of this building is almost an adventure. The design that the whole world knows today was first set aside by the jury, the budget grew fifteenfold, and the architect left the site and never returned.
How the world’s most recognizable theatre was built
1. A design from the pile of rejected entries
In 1957 the international competition was won by the Dane Jørn Utzon, a young architect who had never been to Sydney. His “sails” over the harbor were at first put by the jury among the rejected entries, and only one jury member pulled the sketches from the pile and insisted they win.
2. Four years became fourteen
Construction was planned to take four years and cost seven million dollars. In the end the theatre took fourteen years to build and cost more than a hundred million. In 1966 Utzon fell out with the authorities, left Australia and never returned; he never saw his greatest building completed.
3. Recognition came later
In 2003 Utzon received the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest award. And in 2007 the Sydney Opera House was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, one of the youngest buildings on it.
Photos: Bernard Spragg (CC0), Roybb95 (CC BY-SA 3.0), Photographic Collection from Australia (CC BY 2.0) / Wikimedia Commons
