Structural shop drawings at the Sydney Opera House: An instructive model of information flow?

Abstract

The history of the design decisions directly related to the construction of the Sydney Opera House remains largely anecdotal. A rich group of items recently discovered in Australia may now start filling this gap, as documents brought to light include the drawings issued by the general contractor to build the concrete formwork for the shells, drawings of the temporary structures and falsework, site images, and contractor’s notes. All in all, the drawings display sophisticated combinatory solutions for attaining the structural form required whilst introducing repetition and flexibility in the making of the discrete pieces. While suggesting a remarkable combination of manufacturing and structural shrewdness, these blueprints call into question the canonical history of the building roof’s famous ‘sails’, the rhetoric of the ‘spherical solution’ used to arrive at them, and, most importantly, the information production and knowledge management model we conventionally work within.