CE 2000
9/3/2014
Sydney Opera Theatre The Sydney Opera Theatre located in Sydney, Australia, is a back drop to many pictures taken from the Sydney Harbor. This piece of infrastructure was started in 1959 and completely built by 1973 by Jorn Utzon, who was more of an artist than an engineer (Sydney Opera House construction, 2014). Jorn Utzon never visited the site, but only used charts to study the harbor. Ove Arup was the structural engineer for the site, but he also had a great imagination for what this building could become. Corbet Gore, a civil engineer, was the construction manager for the site who was best known for his ability to manage people, and getting the shell built (An Engineering Walk Around the Sydney Opera Theatre, 2014). The building was originally going to be funded by donations, but when only $900,000 was raised the Australian lottery used its profits to fund the rest which was $102 million. The opera house in made up of mostly steel cables and concrete, the roof alone weighs 27,230 tons and are covered with exactly 1,056,056 Swedish ceramic tiles arranged in 4,253 pre-cast lids, which are held together by 350 km of steel cable (Sydney Opera House construction, 2014). The highest point on the building is 221 feet and it is almost 380 feet wide. The glass that encompasses the mouths of the roof is in total 67,000 square feet, and of this there are 2000 panes and 700 different pane sizes (Sydney Opera House construction, 2014). To get the roof on cranes had to be shipped custom built from France. The cranes were on a rail system with smaller cranes bellow. The roof was built by the smaller cranes