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On Friday 2nd of Jan we arrived at Sydney Opera House for a short tour.
We began by having our photo taken in front of what we thought was a bland artistic backdrop, that didn't have any relevance to the Opera House.
In the 1940's the Director of the NSW State Conservatorium of Music suggested that an opera house should be built, as the old venue was not large enough. This was later agreed by NSW Premier Joseph Cahill and in 1956 the NSW Government declared an open-ended international design competition, for designers to submit their ideas of how they would like the Opera House to look.
The majority of the designs were geometric in shape, but one artist called Jorn Utzon, stood out from the rest, because of it's unusual organic and oval shapes. However, this was originally put into the reject pile, until a new judge entered the competition. He insisted on seeing all the entries, including the rejects and was inspired by Jorn's design idea, later declaring him the winner! Unknowing it would later become the most iconic building of the 20th centuary!
The roof is decorated with Swedish ceramic tiles that have a mix of matt and gloss finishes that have been cut to very intricate shapes. These tiles were purposly chosen/designed to capture the environment surrounding the building. Picking up colours of the sunset or even just a grey sky, creating a living sculpture.
Jorn Utzon also wanted the building to connect with the harbour and by doing so had several large deep set windows fitted throughout. This allowed us to have great views as we walked around and also let lots of natural light in.
On our tour we were only able to enter some parts of the opera house. We saw three venue rooms, the reception hall, Western foyer and a space outside called Hurricane alley.
Two of the performance rooms were quite basic, but the last one we saw was very dramatic in comparison. It was called the Concert hall, a room with a high vaulted ceiling and interior finishes of brush box and white birch timber, designed specifically for acoustic performances. It also holds the worlds largest machanical action organ, which has 10,154 pipes, baroque in style.
This performance venue has been used for many differen't purposes, Rock concerts, Boxing tournemants in the 1970's and Arnold Schwarzenegger even won his final Mr Olympia body building title in 1980 there!
As we left the room, we walked through a beautiful corridor which surrounded us with all kinds of organic shapes! We reached a lobby area and a certain section on the wall was pointed out to us. It was a decoratice 3D shape designed to look like the back of a ship, inspired by his father.
Another area of interest was hurricane alley, a narrow corridor outside, where two sections of the roof (also called sails) nearly meet. It can get very windy up there and when it rains all the water runs into the passage way, cleaning the tiles at the same time. Billy Connolly and a choir have apparently performed on top of one of the sails!
Finally we entered what was called the Reception Hall. It was a retangular shaped room, had a large panoramic window stretching across the entire right wall, with a fabulous view of the harbour. To the left there was a large piece of tapestry running the whole length of the left wall. It was the pattern we had our picture taken infront of! The tour guide explained that it was designed by Jorn Utzon himself and what we saw as a previously bland piece of art, actually had some meaning. It was a white canvas with large black and colourful lines representing notes and rhythm. I could see more life in it now, imagining an orchestra of all kinds of sounds.
I thouroughly enjoyed learning a little bit more about this iconic building. At college I was always inspired by artists who use nature as their tool or influence. Jorn definitely deserved being inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as "a masterpiece of human creative genius."
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