What is there to do at Sydney Opera House?
The Sydney Opera House stands on Bennelong Point, a narrow headland that juts into Sydney Harbour and was once the site of a Fort Macquarie tram depot before Jørn Utzon's radical design transformed it into what UNESCO declared "an outstanding example of 20th century architecture." The building was designated a World Heritage Site in 2007 — one of the youngest buildings ever to receive the classification — on the grounds of its "outstanding universal value" as a work of creative genius.
The design story begins in 1957, when Utzon, then 38 and relatively unknown, submitted a set of freehand sketches to an international competition that received 233 entries from 32 countries. The Danish architect's sheets were initially pulled from the reject pile by competition judge Eero Saarinen, who recognised in the sweeping forms something no other entry had attempted. The engineering challenge of realising those forms consumed a decade: the parabolic shells Utzon first envisioned were geometrically impossible to build; the solution that finally worked — treating each sail as a segment of a single perfect sphere — came to Utzon while he was peeling an orange in 1961, and the resulting design is now known as the spherical solution.
Construction began in 1959 and proceeded with political turbulence. Utzon resigned in 1966 following a funding dispute and was never reconciled with the NSW government; he did not see the finished building before his death in 2008. The building opened in 1973 under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Queen Elizabeth II. Today it hosts the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Opera Australia, the Australian Ballet, and the Sydney Theatre Company across eight performance venues seating between 65 and 2,679 people.