Sydney Opera House Australia

Designed by Jørn Utzon in the 1950's, its innovative design is instantly recognized worldwide.

Photo by Bernard Spragg. NZ

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The winning design was pulled out of the reject pile. The story goes that the American architect Eero Saarinen arrived late to judge the 1956 competition, found the shortlist underwhelming, and started flipping through the entries the other judges had already dismissed.

He stopped at entry number 218 and told the panel they had their winner. It belonged to Jørn Utzon, a 38-year-old Danish architect nobody in Australia had heard of.

Utzon's design was a cluster of white shells rising out of Sydney Harbour, meant to look like sails. It was announced as the winner in January 1957.

Construction began on March 2, 1959, after the old Fort Macquarie Tram Depot was knocked down. There was one enormous problem: nobody knew how to actually build the roof.

The shells were curved in a way that couldn't be made from repeatable parts, so every piece would have been unique and impossibly expensive. Utzon and the engineers went through twelve different versions over about six years.

The answer came in 1961. Utzon realized that if every shell were cut from the surface of the same imaginary sphere, like segments peeled from one giant orange, the pieces could be cast in shared molds.

That breakthrough made the building possible. More than 2,000 concrete segments were prefabricated and lifted into place, then covered with over a million white and cream tiles shipped from Sweden.

The money was another story. The original estimate was $7 million with a finish date of 1963.

A state lottery paid for most of it. Costs kept climbing, newspapers called the project "Utzon's Folly," and after a new government took power and began withholding his fees, Utzon resigned on February 28, 1966.

He left Australia and never came back. An Australian team led by Peter Hall finished the interiors.

Queen Elizabeth II opened the building on October 20, 1973, ten years late and at a final cost of $102 million. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.

Take a guided tour to get inside the Concert Hall, which seats 2,679 people, and see the shells from underneath. Walk the steps and the forecourt for free, and get close enough to spot the two different tile finishes, one glossy and one matte. Check what's playing, since the building hosts more than 1,800 performances a year.

Who designed the Sydney Opera House?

The Sydney Opera House was designed by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon. Utzon's visionary design for the Sydney Opera House, characterized by its distinctive shell-like structures, won an international design competition in 1957. His design was lauded for its groundbreaking and innovative approach to architectural form.