Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House is in Sydney, a big city in Australia.

Its roof looks like big white sails. The sails shine in the sun. Inside, people watch singing, music, plays and dancing. Boats sail past on the water outside.

The Sydney Opera House sits at the tip of a point of land that pokes out into Sydney Harbour. The Gadigal people, who have long cared for this land, call the point Tubowgule. Today it is also called Bennelong Point.

The building is a performing arts center, a place for opera, concerts, plays, dance and more. UNESCO describes its roof as three groups of curved "shells" that cover two main halls and a restaurant. They stand on a huge platform, with walkways all around. The shells were designed by Jørn Utzon, an architect from Denmark, and the building opened in 1973.

The Opera House stands on Bennelong Point, known to its traditional custodians, the Gadigal, as Tubowgule. UNESCO describes it as "a great urban sculpture" at the tip of a peninsula projecting into Sydney Harbour: three groups of interlocking vaulted shells roofing two main performance halls and a restaurant, set on a vast platform ringed by terraces that act as pedestrian concourses.

It was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2007 under criterion (i) alone, as a great architectural work of the 20th century; UNESCO credits both Jørn Utzon's design and Ove Arup's engineering. It had already been placed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register (2003) and the National Heritage List (2005). It is run by the Sydney Opera House Trust, a statutory body set up under an act of 1961, and calls itself the nation's leading tourism destination and one of the world's busiest performing arts centers.

The roof shells are covered with tiny tiles. There are more than one million of them!

The tiles are white and shiny. Big glass walls let people inside look out at the water.

Utzon wanted the shells to stand out against the blue harbor and sky. The tiles had to be glossy, but not so shiny that they would dazzle people. A Swedish company, Höganäs, worked for three years to make the special Sydney Tile, 120 millimeters square. More than a million of them, 1,056,006 in all, cover the roof.

Under the shells are the halls. The Concert Hall is the largest performance space. The Joan Sutherland Theatre, named after a famous Australian opera singer, is the second largest indoor venue. Huge walls of glass look out over the harbor.

The Sydney Tile, 120 mm square, was developed over three years by Höganäs of Sweden from clay with a small share of crushed stone; Utzon had admired Japanese ceramic bowls whose clay gave them a subtle, granular coarseness. Tiles were laid face down in 26 chevron-shaped beds, curved to match the roof, in a factory set up under the Monumental Steps, producing 4,228 tile chevrons and 1,056,006 tiles in all.

The foyers' glass walls, more than 6,200 m² of glass from the French firm Boussois-Souchon-Neuvesel, were developed by Arup's firm and Peter Hall's team, balancing Utzon's vision of glass curtains on plywood and brass mullions with engineering and acoustic needs. The Concert Hall, redesigned for symphonic music after Hall's 1966 study tour, is the largest performance space; the Joan Sutherland Theatre (named in 2012) is the second largest indoor venue. The Utzon Room is one of only two interiors finished entirely to Utzon's design.

Today, it is one of the busiest arts centers in the world.

People come to sing, dance, play music and listen. Every day, bright art by First Nations artists is shown on the sails.

The Opera House calls itself the symbol of modern Australia. Opera, ballet, concerts, plays and comedy all take place under its shells, and outdoor shows fill the Forecourt.

Since 2017, an event called Badu Gili has lit up the sails with art by First Nations artists. Badu Gili means "water light" in the Gadigal language. The building has also been carefully renewed. Its Concert Hall closed in 2020 for more than two years of work and reopened on July 20, 2022.

Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the building on October 20, 1973; the first opera, Prokofiev's War and Peace, had already played on September 28. Utzon never returned to see it, but in 1999 he agreed to act again as its architect, and his redesigned Reception Hall reopened as the Utzon Room in 2004.

A "Decade of Renewal", almost $300 million of capital works funded by the New South Wales Government, has rebuilt parts of the building for the 21st century. The Concert Hall closed in early 2020 for renovations lasting more than two years, reopening to audiences on July 20, 2022. Since 2017 Badu Gili, meaning "water light" in the Gadigal language, has projected First Nations art on the Bennelong sails. In the 50th-anniversary year of 2023, more than 240,000 people attended ticketed events of the anniversary program, and almost two million experienced its free outdoor events.