I've seen pictures of the Sydney Opera House many times. It is such an iconic building! The Opera House was on my bucket list of things to see while in Australia. Abby wasn't too excited about it, but she came along because it's what we wanted to do.
The Opera House was Designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon. Utzon's design won an international competition in 1957. His design was quite unique, but had many unanswered questions about the structural engineering at the time he won the competition. Although the name suggests a single venue, the building comprises multiple performance venues which together host well over 1,500 performances annually, attended by more than 1.2 million people. The original cost estimate of this design was a mere $5.5 million. As it seems to be with all projects, the final cost was just slightly over budget at $102 million and was ten years late in its completion. The Sydney Opera House was formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II on October 20, 1973.
While the shells appear uniformly white from a distance, they actually have a subtle chevron pattern composed of 1,056,006 tiles in two colors: glossy white and matte cream.
The Concert Hall in the picture below has 2,679 seats and is the home of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. It is used by a large number of other concert presenters and contains the Sydney Opera House Grand Organ, the largest mechanical tracker action organ in the world, with over 10,000 pipes. Every single thing in this hall was designed for the ultimate acoustic experience and every seat is designed to experience the same acoustic quality. The "disks" at the top of the picture, above the stage, were designed to allow the musicians to hear their own music, by making it bounce back to them.
For our tour, we had headsets so we could listen to our tour guide without her needing to be too loud. There were various things happening in the Opera House as far as building sets and rehearsals, so we had to ensure that we were quiet on our tour. That is our tour guide on the right. She was incredibly knowledgeable about the entire Opera House and provided a great tour. Here is a picture of one of the bars at the Opera House, as they were getting ready for the night's events.
I think it would be incredibly amazing to see Spartacus as a ballet! Wowsa!
Here are more pictures of the various areas of the Opera House -- absolutely stunning!
And, as it's right on the Harbour, we had to have pictures of the Harbour from inside the Opera House.
If you'd like more information about the Sydney Opera House, feel free to check it out here: Sydney Opera House Information. There's a ton of really interesting information on this incredible building!
Hope you enjoyed our "virtual tour" of the Sydney Opera House!
Love, Peace and Prayers,
Julie & Greg
