Sydney Opera House
A multi-venue performing arts center on Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbour, consisting of a series of interlocking vaulted shells — clad in over a million Swedish ceramic tiles that shift color from white to buff to grey with the changing light — that form the roofs of the Concert Hall, Opera Theater, and Drama Theater. The shells, whose structural logic Utzon resolved by treating each as a section of a single sphere, required the most complex computer calculation ever applied to a building structure in 1959. Utzon resigned in 1966 following a dispute with the government client and never saw the completed building.
The Sydney Opera House is Australia's most internationally recognizable structure and one of the most photographed buildings in the world, having been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007 — the first building to receive the designation while still in active use — and recognized as an outstanding example of 20th-century architectural expressionism. Its profile has become the visual identity of an entire continent. Its construction drove the development of shell-structure engineering that enabled a generation of structurally expressive buildings.
Utzon won the international competition for the Sydney Opera House in 1957 with a sketch that the engineering jury initially scored 0 points before Eero Saarinen pulled it from the rejected pile. Its construction, originally budgeted at AUS$7 million and completed at AUS$102 million, was financed through a state lottery — making it the world's most famous building funded by gambling. The Opera House transformed Australia's global cultural identity almost single-handedly.