More correctly 'Richard Hammond's Engineering Connections: Sydney Opera House'

Normally I don't much like the little twerp,but watched it because it was about our Opera House which I love.

A terrific programme. I learned a lot. Highly recommended . I realise it was probably shown in the UK some time ago. I mention it as some may have missed it.

The link below is general information about the Opera House.


Sydney Opera House is a modern expressionist design, with a series of large precast concrete "shells",[4] each composed of sections of a hemisphere of the same radius, forming the roofs of the structure, set on a monumental podium. The building covers 1.8 hectares (4.5 acres) of land and is 183 metres (605 ft) long and 120 metres (388 ft) wide at its widest point. It is supported on 588 concrete piers sunk as much as 25 metres below sea level.
The roofs of the House are covered in a subtle chevron pattern with 1,056,006 glossy white- and matte-cream-colored Swedish-made tiles from Höganäs AB,[5] though, from a distance, the shells appear a uniform white.
The Concert Hall is located within the western group of shells, the Opera Theatre within the eastern group. The scale of the shells was chosen to reflect the internal height requirements, with low entrance spaces, rising over the seating areas and up to the high stage towers. The smaller venues, Drama Theatre, Playhouse, and The Studio are located beneath the Concert Hall. A smaller group of shells set to one side of the Monumental Steps houses the Bennelong Restaurant. Although the roof structures of the Sydney Opera House are commonly referred to as "shells" (as they are in this article), they are in fact not shells in a strictly structural sense, but are instead precast concrete panels supported by precast concrete ribs.[6]
Apart from the tile of the shells and the glass curtain walls of the foyer spaces, the building's exterior is largely clad with aggregate panels composed of pink granite quarried in Tarana. Significant interior surface treatments also include off-form concrete, Australian white birch plywood supplied from Wauchope in northern New South Wales, and brush box glulam.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House