Cruise & Travel

Sidney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House is an expressionist modern design, with a series of large precast concrete ‘shells’, each taken from the same hemisphere, forming the roofs of the structure. The Opera House covers 1.8 hectares (4.5 acres) of land. It is 183 metres (605 feet) long and about 120 metres (388 feet) wide at its widest point. It is supported on 580 concrete piers sunk up to 25 metres below sea level. Its power supply is equivalent for a town of 25,000 people. The power is distributed by 645 kilometres of electrical cable.

The roofs of the House are covered with 1.056 million glossy white and matte cream Swedish-made tiles,though from a distance the tiles look only white. Despite their self-cleaning nature, they are still subject to periodic maintenance and replacement.

The Concert Hall and Opera Theatre are each contained in the two largest groups of shells, and the other theatres are located on the sides of the shell groupings. The form of the shells is chosen to reflect the internal height requirements, rising from the low entrance spaces, over the seating areas and up to the high stage towers. A much smaller group of shells set to one side of the Monumental steps and houses the Bennelong Restaurant. Although the roof structures of the Sydney Opera House are commonly referred to as shells (as they are in this article), they are in fact not shells in a strictly structural sense, but are instead precast concrete panels supported by precast concrete ribs. The building’s interior is composed of pink granite quarried in Tarana and wood and brush box plywood supplied from northern New South Wales.

Performance venues and facilities The Concert Theatre and Grand OrganThe Sydney Opera House contains five theatres, five rehearsal studios, two main halls, four restaurants, six bars and numerous souvenir shops.

The five theatres making up the performance facilities:

Concert Hall

The Concert Hall, with 2,679 seats, contains the Sydney Opera House Grand Organ, the largest mechanical tracker action organ in the world with over 10,000 pipes.The Opera Theatre, with 1,547 seats, is the main performance space for Opera Australia; it is also used by the Australian Ballet Company. The Drama Theatre, with 544 seats The Playhouse, with 398 seats The Studio Theatre, with 364 seats Besides theatrical productions, venues at the Sydney Opera House are also used for functions such as weddings, parties and conferences.