Australia research for type

The Sydney Opera House is considered one of the finest architectural achievements of the 20^thcentury. It is also one of the most recognizable buildings on the planet. Even those who don't actually know that it is located in Australia or that it is an opera house are familiar with its rising segmented shape. The conventional wisdom surrounding the Sydney Opera House is that its gleaming white circular spires is supposed to represent the sails on the tall sailing ships that brought so many of the ancestors of the Anglo residents of modern day Australian to the island that would pay penance for their treatment of the indigenous tribes by being forced to admit they were also responsible for Jacko, Yahoo Serious and makingMel Gibson a star. In fact, the design of the Sydney Opera House is not based upon sails of wooden ships.

Construction of the Sydney Opera House was initiated in the 1950s by Eugene Goossens, who was the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. A competition to arrive at a final design commenced thereafter and the winner was a Danish gentlemen named Jorn Utzon. In light of the work of Frank Gehry and all the other fantastical designs that place themselves in opposition to the standard square and rectangular means of constructing buildings today, Utzon's concept probably came as quite a shock to those intent on building the opera house. Rather than straight and narrow or broad and flat, Utzon proposed the radical idea of huge shell-shaped structures exuding outward from the center of the building. Utzon's opera house design was even more bizarre than some of the circular buildings that were the epitome of edgy at the time. The site for the new Sydney Opera House was to be located on the water and so it perhaps seems just natural accept that the design was intended to represent sails on a ship.

As with many things that seem obvious, however, it is simply not true that the elegant design of the Sydney Opera House as anything to with the conventional wisdom. The inspiration for those segmented curvatures atop the most famous building in the Southern Hemisphere was not the sails of a ship, but rather a simple orange. The Sydney Opera House is supposed to look like the segments of a orange that has been carefully sliced open. Regardless of whether the Sydney Opera House reminds you of orange slices or sails atop a ship, it has gone on to become a modern architectural wonder despite the fact that history's most famous architect, and the real life inspiration for Ayn Rand's ridiculously simplistic hero Howard Roarke, said of it: "The circus tent is not architecture."