21 Amazing Facts About Sydney Opera House

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Facts about the Sydney Opera House

1. Construction on the Sydney Opera House was forecast to take just 4 years. It soon became clear that that wouldn’t be possible. It ended up taking 14 years to complete. Over 10,000 workers took part in the construction process.
2. The temperatures inside of the house have to stay at precisely 22.5 degrees Celsius in order to ensure that the instruments for the orchestra stay perfectly in tune.
3. The design for the opera house was originally an international contest where 233 designers were submitted. Jørn Utzon of Denmark won the competition and won 5,000 pounds. 
4. Utzon became the chief architect for the construction of the project. However, in 1966 he resigned because the new local government stopped paying him. He never returned to the project.
5. The current Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth II, opened the house on October 20th, 1973. 
6. The Opera House was originally budgeted to take $7 million AUS at the time to complete. However, it ended up costing $102 million, mostly paid for by the Australian Lottery.
7. The roof of the structure is made up of 2,194 pre-cast roof sections weighing up to 15 tons each and covered in 1 million tiles made by the Swedish company Höganas.
8. The cooling system for the Sydney Opera House uses seawater from the surrounding harbor. It circulates the cold water from the harbor through pipes stretching 35 kilometers, acting as thermal fluid in the heating and cooling of the building.
9. Every year the house hosts about 3,000 events. The building is kept in high-use.
10. More than 10 million people walk through the opera house’s halls each year. 
11. There are 7 different venues in the Sydney Opera House, and the largest has 2,679 seats.
12. The smallest room, on the other hand, called the Utzon room, only has 210 seats.
13. The highest roof point on the structure is the equivalent height of a 22 story building.
14. Every year, 15,500 light bulbs are changed in the structure to keep everything lit properly.
15. The Sydney Opera House has 3 restaurants, a café & espresso bar, and bars in the opera and theater.
16. The entire structure is absolutely massive. The site itself can fit 7 A380s sitting wing to wing, and the building contains 1,000 rooms.
17. The grand organ housed in the Concert Hall is the largest mechanical organ in the world. It is made up of 10,154 pipes, and it took 10 years to construct.
18. Arnold Schwarzenegger won his last Mr. Olympia title for bodybuilding in 1980 in the halls of the orchestra.
19. The Sydney Opera House has over 6,000 square meters of made-to-order glass from France and 650 kilometers of cabling for electricity and electronics throughout.
20. The building was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007, described as a “great urban sculpture set in a remarkable waterscape, at the tip of a peninsula projecting into Sydney Harbour.”
21. The first person that ever performed inside the house’s halls was Paul Robeson, in 1960. Notably, this is before the construction of the project was ever completed. The singer visited the construction workers during lunch and sang Ol’ Man River to them.