Tine Lund: Loving Sydney

Another walk in this spectacular city. As some might know, Jørn Utzon was the Danish architect behind the Sydney Opera House back in 1973.  As a Dane, I am just as proud of the opera house as the Australian people, and it is therefore a very important thing for me to see.  

The base for the building was started in 1959—years before the designs were finished. It took four years to design, and by 1962 the designs were finalized and construction began. In total it took 14 years to build and was officially opened on the 20th of October, 1973 by Queen Elizabeth II.  

My old professor Kjeld Jensen from the Danish School of Graphic Design was a great friend of Jørn Utzon and he told me once that the idea for the unique Opera House came one day when the architect was sitting playing with an orange he had been cutting in quarters. Imagine having 4 quarters of the skin of an orange and slicing them thinner in to 1/8 and then putting them back together to create a new shape. That's the result of the opera house.

And here I am standing face to face with the big monument—it's bigger than I had imagined. And I am thinking to myself, the Sydney Opera House is a masterpiece of late modern architecture which pushed architecture and engineering to new limits, and which has had an enduring influence on late 20th century architecture and beyond.

I walked around it and found that I could look at it for hours. All the little details the you don't normally see on pictures and the beautiful colors that in this particular light came out so very brilliantly.

People in Sydney love this place and they use it for special occasions like shooting wedding pictures and having a drink with friends at the Opera Bar close to the water. Sydneysiders and tourists alike attend performances such as the theater, children's concerts, the symphony, ballet, and of course, the opera. There is also a restaurant named Bennelong which is expensive but offers amazing views of one of the greatest harbors in the world.

Today, the Sydney Opera House is one of the busiest performing arts centers in the world, each year staging up to 2,500 performances and events, drawing around 1.5 million patrons, and attracting an estimated 4 million visitors. The Sydney Opera House was also inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2007.

I love this city, I wish I could live here!