Sydney Opera House
— — sails that never quite take the wind.
Not only on a wall.
“Bennelong Point, where the harbour bends. The white shell roofs catch the light off the water and throw it back at the bridge across the cove. Ferries leave the quay every few minutes, the wakes crossing under the Harbour Bridge to the north. At sunset the tiles run from cool white to warm cream to gold, then slip into the floodlit blue-white that holds until the late performances let out. from the studio
Sydney Opera House, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Sydney Opera House sits on Bennelong Point, a small peninsula jutting into Sydney Harbour just east of the Harbour Bridge. Designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, it opened in 1973 after fourteen years of construction. The building houses six performance venues, including the 2,679-seat Concert Hall, and stages more than 1,800 performances a year. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2007 as a masterpiece of 20th-century architecture, one of the youngest cultural properties ever listed.
The roof reads white from a distance but is actually clad in 1,056,006 ceramic tiles in two shades, a glossy cream and a matte off-white, arranged in chevron patterns across each shell. The tiles were custom-made by Swedish firm Höganäs Keramik and self-clean in the rain. The shells themselves are precast concrete ribs, the geometry resolved by Utzon as sections of a single notional sphere, a breakthrough that finally made the roofs buildable after years of structural deadlock.
Guided tours run daily from 9:00, lasting about an hour, with backstage tours offered in the morning before performances load in. Most patrons arrive at the venue via Circular Quay station, a five-minute walk along the harbour. The forecourt is open at all hours and is the best public vantage on the shells. Vivid Sydney, the annual light festival held over three weeks in May and June, projects moving light onto the sails nightly and is the building's busiest period.