The Sydney Opera House Trivia Quiz

Answer: Bennelong Point

Bennelong was more or less kidnapped by the early Europeans who settled Australia, and taken to our first governor, Arthur Phillip. The peculiar reason given for his enforced journey to Government House was that Governor Phillip wanted to establish cordial relationships with the local aboriginal people who lived in the Port Jackson area.

A strange way to go about such an aim, it's true, but it did work to a degree. Bennelong was quite a character, a bit of a rogue, but extremely intelligent and quite adept at turning events to his favour over the years that followed.

This included his request to have Phillip's men build him a comfortable hut on an area of land overlooking Sydney Harbour. Since that time, this prime piece of land has been known as Bennelong Point.

It is here that the Sydney Opera House was built some 150 years later.

Answer: Jørn Utzon from Denmark

Requirements for this design stated that it must include a hall large enough to seat 3,000 cultured bottoms, another to seat 1,200, and with suitably sized areas incorporated in each hall to accommodate opera or ballet productions, orchestral and vocal performance concerts, lecture theatre, and various large meetings. Entries by 233 architects representing 32 countries from all over the globe flooded in, but it would be Jørn Utzon from Denmark whose design was selected as the ultimate winner.

Answer: Podium

A podium, in simple terms. is an elevated stage high enough so that those in the back seats of an auditorium have a clear view of the performance area, but low enough so that the audience in the front don't have to crane their necks to see. This first stage of construction was fraught with problems from the very beginning because of the enforced commencement of the building before all design plans were finalised. The government, fearing public opinion would turn against it over the proposed costs of the opera house, had insisted on this early start. As a result, workers encountered major structural problems at almost every section, the work fell behind schedule by almost a year, and there were also ongoing problems with the myriad contracts involved. This stage took almost four years before it finally reached completion.

With a temporary, hastily erected roof over the work area below, builders feverishly scuttled about the task of catching up. The framework for the rooms associated with any major concert hall were put in place, the huge podium area commenced, the skeletons of the structures for the lighting, sound and seating facilities got under way, and the extremely important columns to support the later planned roof over the podium put in place. Then the abysmal decision on the part of the government to commence work before planning was completed saw the first of many setbacks occurring. One example of these problems was the realisation that those essential columns hastily installed before time were not going to be strong enough to support the originally planned roof once it was erected.

Answer: Its sail shaped roof

It's more than likely that if anyone was asked to describe the Sydney Opera House's most salient feature, that would be the striking design of its roof. This comprises an impressive series of concrete sails. How these ever came to be completed is an outstanding feat alone.

The architect had still not completed their geometrical design when work began on this stage, and the preliminary plans given to the team of builders were, in fact, unworkable. It took the design department an astonishing four more years to come up with a solution that worked. During this period, twelve different forms of the sails were tried, but subsequently discarded.

Answer: Computer aided design

This is fact was one of the first times that computers were used for structural analysis, and, for the Opera House, they were to prove a Godsend. The ultimate solution was a computerised design of the roof sails incorporated into the shape of a sphere, and manipulated and adjusted on the screen until they fitted exactly, with a perfect sphere ultimately formed. From that, the specification for each part of a sail was sectioned out at a time, and its actual construction built to that specification.

This allowed for concrete arches of different lengths to fit snugly one behind another. Described by those working on the project as "a Eureka moment", the original architect has been given the credit for this solution. However, some doubt still remains today whether it was really his lightbulb moment, or that of another professional working on the same problem. That gentleman's name was Ove Arup.

He was a brilliant structural engineer from the United Kingdom. We will never really know for certain which of the two men was in his bath when that Eureka moment occurred to him.

Answer: The architect resigned

Before stage III commenced in 1963, and with the cost to date kept to a very impressive 25% of the overall projected sum, the original architect for the entire project moved permanently to Sydney, so that he could supervise this final very detailed part of the work himself.

In the meantime though, there had been a change in the government of New South Wales. This new government, to his horror, removed the completion of the project from the engineering firm that had taken it through its first two successful stages - and handed it over to the Ministry for Public Works instead.

This was a dreadful thing to do, insulting and, quite frankly, stupid. Government departments in this country are notorious for their slowness, their miles of unnecessary red tape and their over-abundance of managers who often know little of the internal runnings of their own departments.

This decision on the part of the government, and the resultant escalating costs and delays it brought to the project, led to the architect's resignation in 1966.

Answer: The acoustics

The hatchets came out big time. The original designs and specifications for the interior were ripped to pieces by the replacement architects who had taken over. A major one of these, they announced to all and sundry, was the planning for the acoustics.

The original architect, they stated firmly, had only allowed for 2,000 seats in the large hall instead of the 3,000 specified, and that if those extra 1,000 seats were miraculously added in by them, the acoustics would prove to be disastrous. Following this, everything else about his design was also torn to shreds.

This, according to the new stage designer, included the "shape, height and width of the stage, the physical facilities for artists, the location of the dressing rooms, the widths of doors and lifts, and the location of lighting switchboards". Hatchets, indeed.

Answer: It was too small for large scale opera and ballet productions

In short, the new designers made an appalling mess of the entire interior. The following list includes just a few of their disastrous changes. They turned the major hall for large scale opera productions into a concert hall only. They shifted opera productions over to the smaller hall, but that was now too small for the major productions.

They, peculiarly so, added a cinema and a library which, later, proved so useless they were replaced by small theatres for dramatic works. They changed the layout of the interiors upside down and inside out.

They threw out all the original stage machinery because it now no longer worked with their new designs. They changed the style of the original external cladding to only half that intended. Lord knows what they did with the original planning for the glass walls overlooking the harbour.

They scrapped all the corridor, seating and acoustics designs, replacing them with their own - and with subsequent problems all round. Their arrangements for their new opera theatre were too cramped for the orchestra musicians and played havoc with their hearing. And the most completely inefficient thing they did, in spite of their hearty criticisms of the original architect's designs, was to create even worse acoustic problems for the performance of the operas.

Answer: A million and a half dual coloured tiles

This is perhaps the classiest touch to the Sydney Opera House of all, and, fortunately, an original choice that was left untouched by the new designers. Those rather lovely concrete sails are covered with precisely 1,056,006 small tiles, placed in what is described as a chevron pattern, and incorporating the two alternating colours of "glossy white and matte cream". Further artistic and truly lovely original design touches to our grand old lady overlooking the Sydney Harbour are her interior touches of top-of-the-range wood trimmings, her glass curtained walls in the foyer, the luxury of her seating, the flooring, and the pink granite panelling on the walls.

She is a true work of art in spite of all the troubles associated with her debut into society.

Answer: 1973

What a grand occasion that proved to be. Speeches galore, pats on the back all round, a performance of Beethoven Symphony No. 9 (which, you may be interested to learn, also had a lot of problems in the lead up to its premiere in 1824), fireworks for that evening and all the other special touches to mark such a fine occasion. Sadly though, to our great shame, that great architect who designed this lovely work, not only failed to receive an invitation to this event, his name wasn't even mentioned in the acknowledgements. That's disgraceful.

In the late 1990s however, with a new, clearer thinking committee now in charge of the opera house, this far-sighted designer was appointed by that committee as design consultant for any future works planned for the structure. In 2004, the first of these major changes saw a graceful extension named in his honour. In 2003, he was awarded architecture's highest honour, the Pritzker Architecture Prize for his design of this great building so symbolic of our country. With his name now justifiably and permanently linked to the Sydney Opera House, this amazing man died in 2008, one year after his creation was listed as one of the great buildings on the UNESCO World Heritage site.