Sydney Opera House a talk by Peter Murray OBE

Commissioned explicitly to put Sydney on the map of global cities, The Sydney Opera House was the progenitor of the nineties and noughties concept of building as symbol of place - exemplified by building like the Bilbao Guggenheim , the Stratford Aquatics Centre and even the Burj Khalifa.

Danish architect Jørn Utzon won the job to design the scheme in an International competition in 1957, with construction starting in 1959. Yet by the time of the building’s formal opening in 1973, it became internationally famous for its torturous build, causing a cost overrun of 1400% - from 7 to 100 million ASD. Its notoriety ensured the project its own chapter in Peter Hall’s 1980 classic Great Planning Disasters.

In this talk, Peter Murray OBE, author of The Saga of Sydney Opera House and the Co-Founder of NLA, will reveal the inside story of this Australian icon, based on confidential files from the Arup archives.

Before Sydney, the architect gave the engineers their drawings and the engineers made them stand up. After Sydney architects like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers sat down with their engineers at the start of a project, before any drawings were done. Utzon’s winning scheme was famously drawn without the assistance of any engineer at all and it changed the way architectural competitions were organised around the world. The Opera House was the first major project to be designed and built with the aid of computers.

Utzon himself suggested he designed the building at a time "where the reigning functionalism had not yet yielded to the idea of giving buildings a more humane expression.” Arup’s Jack Zunz thought it was responsible for the diminution of the architect's role and the rise of the project manager, yet it also popularised the collaboration of architect and engineer.

It may have been a one-off, but its influence has been far-reaching.