Horse 238 - The Opera House Sucks

I have to look at this pathetic eyesore everyday as I travel to and from work. Not only is it ugly looking but as this post will show, has no right to exist.

1. Not Fit For Purpose
The Opera House when invisaged was supposed to hold an Opera Hall and a Concert Hall. Little did they realise that the main stage is in fact far to small is hold anything other than operettas and the concert hall isn't useful for anything other than chamber music.
The main Opera Hall is acoustically crap, as evidenced by the huge donut like sounding circles and added to that they've had to install no less than 94 speakers throughout the place so that echos don't reverb through the building.
The main stage was supposed to be hung from the great shells that form the structure of the building. This was pretty well much scrapped from day one as being structurally impossible and thus the building is constructed using conventional methods... oops.

2. Overbudget and Late
The Opera house was supposed to have been completed in 1959 at a total cost of £5m. When calculated and adjusted for inflation, the building was finally opened in 1972 at a cost of £55m. This means that it was 11 times over budget and 13 years late.
The people of NSW decided to fund this via the Opera Lottery (later to become Lotto). Thus the Opera House was in fact the beginning of legalised gambling in this state. Here we are some 45 years later with more poker machines per head of population than any other jurisdiction on the planet... I blame the Opera House.

3. Uglyness
Some say that it looks like sails, some say that it's different from the rest of the city in that it's white. I say that it looks crap. If that had been made say 1000 times smaller and then placed in a town square anywhere in the world it would be quite rightly criticised for being an eyesore and not art.
The only reason that it survives (despite costing a fortune to maintain) is that because it is a great public building, it's harder to justify knocking the thing down. I ask how anyone can possibly justify that it looks "nice" when clearly it's a pointy globular mess. Even Utzon himself washed his hands of the project...

And when the designer walks away from his creation there is only one way to describe it... The Opera House Sucks!