OperaHouse,Australia

OperaHouse

sydney opera house and harbour bridge

The Sydney Opera House in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia is one of the most distinctive and famous 20th-century buildings, and one of the most famous performing arts venues in the world. Situated on Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbour, with parkland to its south and close to the enormous Sydney Harbour Bridge, the building and its surroundings form an iconic Australian image. To some the spherical-sectioned shells remind them of the flotilla of sailboats commonly cruising there. Tourists - mostly with little or no interest in opera - throng to the building in their thousands every week purely to see it. As well as many touring theatre, ballet, and musical productions the Opera House is the home of Opera Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. It is administered by the Opera House Trust, under the New South Wales (NSW) Ministry of the Arts.

Description

The Sydney Opera House has about 1000 rooms, including five theatres, five rehearsal studios, two main halls, four restaurants, six bars and numerous souvenir shops. The roofs of the House are constructed of 1,056,000 glazed white granite tiles, imported from Sweden. Despite their self-cleaning nature, they are still subject to periodic maintenance and replacement. The House interior is composed of pink granite mined from Tarana, NSW and wood and brush box plywood supplied from northern NSW. The five consitutent theatres of the Sydney Opera House are the Concert Hall (with a seating capacity of 2679), the Opera Theatre (1547 seats), the Drama Theatre (544 seats), the Playhouse (398 seats) and the Studio Theatre (364 seats). The Concert Hall contains the Sydney Opera House Grand Organ, the largest mechanical tracker action organ in the world with over 10,000 pipes. The shells of the Opera HouseThe theatres are housed in a series of large shells, conceived by dissecting a hemisphere. The Concert Hall and Opera Theatre are contained in the largest shells, and the other theatres are located on the sides of the shells. Large free public performances have also often been staged in front of the Monumental Steps that lead up to the base of the main sets of shells. A much smaller set of shells set to one side of the Monumental steps houses one of the formal dining restaurants.

History

The Sydney Opera House can be said to have had its beginnings during the late 1940s in the endeavours of Eugene Goossens, the Director of the NSW State Conservatorium of Music at the time, who lobbied to have a suitable venue for large theatrical productions built. At the time, the normal venue for such productions was the Sydney Town Hall, but this venue was simply not large enough. By 1954, Goossens succeeded in gaining the support of NSW Premier Joe Cahill, who called for designs for a dedicated opera house. It was also Goossens who insisted that Bennelong Point be the site for the Opera House. Cahill had wanted it to be on or near the Wynyard Railway Station, located in the north-western Sydney CBD. The competition that Cahill organised received 233 entries. The basic design that was finally accepted in 1955 was submitted by Jørn Utzon, a Danish architect. Utzon arrived in Sydney in 1957 to help supervise the project.

Separate facts The Sydney Opera house:

Was designed by Danish architect Jorn Utzon. Was opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 20 October 1973. Presented, as its first performance, The Australian Opera's production of War and Peace by Prokofiev. Cost $AU 102,000,000 to build. Conducts 3000 events each year. Provides guided tours to 200,000 people each year. Has an annual audience of 2 million for its performances. Includes 1000 rooms. Is 185 metres long and 120 metres wide. Has 2194 pre-cast concrete sections as its roof. Has roof sections weighing up to 15 tons. Has roof sections held together by 350 km of tensioned steel cable. Has over 1 million tiles on the roof. Uses 6225 square metres of glass and 645 kilometres of electric cable. The SydneyHarbourBridge is one of the major landmarks of Sydney, Australia, connecting the Sydney central business district (CBD) with the North Shore commercial and residential areas, both of which are located on Sydney Harbour. The dramatic water vista of the bridge together with the nearby Sydney Opera House is an iconic image of both Sydney and Australia. It was opened on 19 March 1932. The bridge is affectionately known as "the Coathanger" by many Sydney residents on account of its arch-based design. It was the city's tallest structure until 1967. One source of disappointment for those who had built the bridge was the discovery that the Bayonne Bridge in the United States, opened on 15 November 1931, was 700 mm longer. However, that fact was not generally known, and millions of Australian school children throughout the next 50 years were taught, erroneously, that the Sydney Harbour Bridge was the world's longest single-arch bridge. However, it remains the world's largest (but not the longest) steel arch bridge.

Interior

The Concert Hall and organ

Stage III, the interiors, started with Utzon moving his entire office to Sydney in February 1963. However, there was a change of government in 1965, and the new Robert Askin government declared the project under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Works. This ultimately led to Utzon's resignation in 1966 (see below).
The cost of the project so far, even in October 1966, was still only $22.9 million, less than a quarter of the final $102 million cost. However, the projected costs for the design were at this stage much more significant.
The second stage of construction was progressing toward completion when Utzon resigned. His position was principally taken over by Peter Hall, who became largely responsible for the interior design. Other persons appointed that same year to replace Utzon were E. H. Farmer as government architect, D. S. Littlemore and Lionel Todd.
Following Utzon's resignation, the acoustic advisor, Lothar Cremer, confirmed to the Sydney Opera House Executive Committee (SOHEC) that Utzon's original acoustic design only allowed for 2000 seats in the main hall and further stated that increasing the number of seats to 3000 as specified in the brief would be disastrous for the acoustics. According to Peter Jones, the stage designer, Martin Carr, criticised the "shape, height and width of the stage, the physical facilities for artists, the location of the dressing rooms, the widths of doors and lifts, and the location of lighting switchboards."

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