I Visit the Sydney Opera House

I am in Sydney Australia and visiting the Sydney Opera House. What a marvelous structure! From the outside, it is extremely beautiful and as I walk in, the inside corridors are just as stunning, in perfect harmony and mirroring the outside architecture.

Then I walk into the Concert Hall, a somewhat rectangular hall that has no resemblance or common architectural features with the exquisitely designed spherical sections of the exterior of the building. This room is too large (seating for 2,700), too wide and too long. The acoustics are not good. There are few usable lateral or ceiling reflections and nothing to project the sound from the stage to the rear of the hall. The diffraction from the reflective panels only effect the middle frequencies, and the circular seating arrangement around the stage only accentuates these deficiencies. Lastly, the hall exhibits excessive low frequency reverberation, probably because of its size and shape and the lack of low frequency absorption from the abundant, smooth wooden panel surfaces located throughout the hall.

What a disappointment! How could the genius who designed the outside of the Opera House get it so wrong on the inside? It was as if the inside Concert Hall had been designed by another architect entirely!

Well, as it turns out, Jorn Utzon, the brilliant architect of the exterior of the building never had his design for the interior performance space realized and it was in fact completed by a team of government architects. What a pity.

Pictured above, is a model of Utzon's original masterpiece.

Thanks to Michael Moy for his book "Sydney Opera House, Idea to Icon", Alpha Orion Press.