On October 20, 1973, Queen Elizabeth II stood on the steps of a building shaped like billowing sails and declared the Sydney Opera House officially open. Fireworks burst over Sydney Harbor. A flock of white balloons drifted into the sky. Helicopters dropped tinsel. More than a million people lined the shore for one of the biggest parties Australia had ever thrown. The wait had been long - the building had taken fourteen years to construct and cost fifteen times more than the original estimate.
The story began in 1957, when a young Danish architect named Jørn Utzon entered a design competition with sketches of curved white shells rising from the water. He had never even seen Sydney. He won the contest out of more than 200 entries, partly because the judges loved his bold idea. But nobody, including Utzon himself, knew how to actually build those shells. Engineers struggled for years to figure out the geometry. Finally Utzon realized each shell could be cut from the surface of a single imaginary sphere, like wedges from an orange. That insight saved the project.
The shells are covered with over a million ceramic tiles in two shades of cream and white, made in Sweden. From far away they look smooth; up close you can see the tiny lines. Today the Opera House hosts more than 1,800 performances a year - operas, ballets, concerts, comedy shows. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, joining the Pyramids and the Great Wall as one of the world's most important buildings. Not bad for a sketch by an architect who had never visited the harbor.
