Sydney Opera House Essay, Research Paper

There was no true place for performing arts in Australia and this angered many

residents. So Joseph Cahill set up a committee to raise money for an arts

complex. Then, for more funding he established Opera Lotteries. With all the

necessary funds available, the next step was a design. A competition was

organized for the design of the complex. The winner was Jorn Utzon with his

design of a complex with sail shaped roofs. Building began immediately in March

of 1957 on Bennelong Point in Sydney. Many cost overruns and delays and even the

elimination of the angels from the roofs drove Jorn Utzon to resign. The final

cost of the opera house was $107 million dollars. The opera house was completed

in mid 1973 and officially opened on October 20, 1973. The opera house itself is

absolutely marvelous. It has more than one thousand rooms, including five main

auditoriums. The building also has features such as: five rehearsal studios,

four restaurants, six theatre bars, extensive foyer, lounge areas, sixty

dressing rooms and suites, library, artists lounge, administrative offices, and

extensive plant and machinery areas. All these things cause more than two

million people to attend more than three thousand events per year. The opera

house is home to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Australian Ballet, and the

Australian Opera. The largest room in the opera house is the Concert Hall. It

has two hundred and sixty-seven seats. The Concert Hall is used for concerts,

chamber music, opera, choral concerts, pop, jazz concerts, folk concerts,

variety shows, and conventions. It has excellent acoustics with ceilings of

eighty-two feet in height. All the walls in this room are made of woods such as

white birch plywood, hard brown wood, and brush box. The volume of this room is

tremendous at eight hundred and eighty thousand cubic feet. The Concert Hall is

also home to the world?s largest organ. It was built by Ronald Sharp between

1969 and 1979 and has over ten thousand and five hundred pipes. The organ also

has five manual keyboards, one pedal keyboard, eighteen adjustable, acrylic

acoustic rings, and one hundred twenty-seven stops. With all of this, it takes

about two seconds for sound to travel fully everywhere in the room. The next

room is the Opera Theatre with one thousand five hundred and forty-seven seats.

This theatre is used for opera, ballet, and dance. The acoustics of this theatre

are also great with a black ceiling so that audiences will focus more on the

stage and an orchestra pit that holds seventy-five musicians. The Drama Theatre

has over five hundred and forty-four seats. It is used mostly for plays and

lectures. The ceiling in the Drama Theatre is black to keep attention to the

stage, is low in height, and made of refrigerated aluminum panels. The Playhouse

room in the opera house has three hundred and ninety-nine seats. It is mainly

used for small cast plays, lectures, seminars, cinema, and chamber music. The

walls in the Playhouse are paneled with birch plywood. The newest addition to

the opera house is the Studio. It has three hundred and sixty-four seats. This

new addition is used mostly for modern performing arts and ?Contemporary?

performing arts. All of these things make the Sydney Opera House world famous

for its music, drama, events, and of course its world renowned design.