Characteristics of the Design

The Sydney Opera House is an Expressionist construction; the expressionis was a movement relevant because of it deformation of the reality, we can perceive this in the design of the opera house, the big prefabricated shells on the exterior, gives the Opera House some kind of closed and unique Rhythm on the shapes, the shells also has different sizes and some of it has different directions.

The interior of the opera house is cover with warm colors including the carpets. The porpouse of this is to make the people feel more comfortable and relax, so the people can enjoy better the preformance.

The Opera House has 183m of length and 120m of width. The structure rest on 580 inmerse pillars

The roof is cover with 1.056 millions of white glazed tiles that give the exterior of the opera house a unique bumpy texture that you can appreciate only if you are close enough, but if you are looking from a considerable distance the visual texture appears to be pretty smooth in all the surface.

Glazed tiles

The texture on the inside of the structure is variable. From the
smooth surface of the pink granite from Nueva Gales, the texture of the wood in some of the walls and the soft texture of the carpet.

When the sun light falls all over the glazed tile surface of the Opera House it shines and appear to stand out from all the other structures. The night illumination is pretty good too, a lot of colorfull lights around the floor of the structure give enough of an impact to be great and not falling into a bad taste.

The inside illumination tend to be pretty low inside the halls and a general illumination on the corredors for the people to see.

The project was built in three stages.


Stage I (1959-1963) consisted of building the upper podium.

Commenced on March 2, 1959 by the construction firm Civil & Civic, monitored by the engineers Ove Arup and Partners. The government had pushed for work to begin early, fearing that funding, or public opinion, might turn against them. However, Utzon had still not completed the final designs. Major structural issues still remained unresolved. By 23 January 1961, work was running 47 weeks behind, mainly because of unexpected difficulties (inclement weather, unexpected difficulty diverting stormwater, construction beginning before proper construction drawings had been prepared, changes of original contract documents). Work on the podium was finally completed in February 1963. The forced early start led to significant later problems, not least of which was the fact that the podium columns were not strong enough to support the roof structure, and had to be re-built


Construction


Stage II (1963–1967) saw the construction of the outer shells.

The shells of the competition entry were originally of undefined geometry, but, early in the design process, the "shells" were perceived as a series of parabolas supported by precast concrete ribs

The design work on the shells involved one of the earliest uses of computers in structural analysis, in order to understand the complex forces to which the shells would be subjected. In mid-1961, the design team found a solution to the problem: the shells all being created as sections from a sphere. This solution allows arches of varying length to be cast in a common mold, and a number of arch segments of common length to be placed adjacent to one another, to form a spherical section.

Shell ribs


Stage III (1967–1973) consisted of the interior design and construction.

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."

Interior