Paolo Tombesi: Sails, Octopuses, and Beds: The Sydney Opera House Turns 50

For the past 50 years, the Sydney Opera House has been the subject of a prodigious hagiography of the personalities involved in its realization and their legendary quarrels. Yet it remains paradoxically unexplored when it comes to its operative construction decisions, particularly those that relate to the erection of its renowned superstructure in the course of Stage II, between 1963 and 1967. A multi-year research project on the shop drawings produced for the innovative formwork system of the iconic roof sails, led by Luciano Cardellicchio at the University of New South Wales and Paolo Stracchi at the University of Sydney, finally permits to shed light on the hitherto unacknowledged design role of the general contractor, in the process questioning the validity of conventional assumptions about the technical division of labour in complex projects, where construction and project management tend to be kept separate from architectural and structural design. By using the documents discovered by Cardellicchio and Stracchi as a basis for three-dimensional simulations of the construction procedures employed, the need for design exegeses that combine project-based and production-based concerns becomes manifest. In positing the value of an architectural history integrating cultural ideas with technical decisions and actions, the study of the Sydney Opera House suggests that a drastic change in historiographic methods may be both possible and required.