Sixty thousand balloons soared skyward over Sydney harbour, pigeons and white doves were released, and a million people thronged the city’s public places. Utzon, weary of the endless wrangling, resigned from the project in 1966 and declined an invitation to the opening ceremony.īut on that October day in 1973, all those tribulations were forgotten. The overspend, too, was eye-popping – 102 million Australian dollars was the final bill, compared to an initial 7 million estimate. Originally scheduled to end in 1963, the build was eventually completed ten years later. Construction began in 1959, but was dogged by delays and cost overruns, many caused by the complexity of Utzon’s design. How long did it take to construct the Sydney Opera House? A competition to design the new building was launched in 1956, and the choice of Danish architect Jørn Utzon as winner was divisive: some loved his futuristic, white-sails-in-the-sunshine conception others derided its system of interlocking vaulted shells as drastically impractical. The Sydney Opera House project, nearly two decades in the making, had in fact been dogged with controversy from the outset. Who designed the Sydney Opera House?Īustralians, famed for wit as dry as their national outback country, no doubt appreciated this royal piece of understatement. The speech itself was not without irony: ‘I understand that its construction has not been totally without problems,’ the Queen said, referring to the majestic edifice before her. Wearing a silken dress of duck-egg blue and matching hat – ‘not unlike an inverted sail of the opera house’, one observer commented – the monarch gripped the pages of her script tightly as wind buffeted the platform. (Photo by Fairfax Media via Getty Images via Getty Images)
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