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Sydney Opera House

Ian Cashen, Director of Building, Safety & Security

Sydney Opera House: How Technology is Conserving a Concrete Masterpiece

Ian Cashen

The Sydney Opera House is a leading example of 20th century architecture, the most widely recognized building in Australia. It is not only architect, Jørn Utzon’s crowning architectural achievement but it has become the symbol of modern Australia, the nation’s premier tourist destination and one of the world’s busiest performing arts centers. It continually attracts nationally and internationally acclaimed performers, and is a mecca for visitors from around Australia and overseas. A critical part of our custodianship is the conservation of the building to ensure it can continue to be home to 2000 performances a year and the more than 10 billion visitors each year. This scale of patronage, never contemplated at the time of its design, place an onerous duty on our role to ensure the building can continue to be adapted to be fit-for-purpose for future generations, while respecting the building’s heritage significance.

To ensure we respect the building’s heritage significance while managing change to ensure the building is fit for purpose for future generations, for some time, we have been incorporating newconstruction technologies into how we monitor the Opera House—and importantly—conduct any change or upgrades to the structure.

Business information modeling (BIM) system helps us develop robust, logical and repeatable systems for inspecting, conserving and managing the opera house building and the wider precinct

The technology we have found most beneficial is the Business Information Modeling (BIM) system which helps us develop robust, logical and repeatable systems for inspecting, conserving and managing the Opera House building and the wider precinct. It allows us to create a digital model of the Opera House building and precinct so that our team of builders, engineers and architects can plan, design, construct, and manage any change to the building before construction begins.

An example where this technology has been successfully applied is in the monitoring of nearly 1 million tiles that cover the Opera House’s famous white shells. Every five years, skilled inspection engineers abseil the Opera House to “tap test” each tile which is fixed to precast concrete “tile lids” checking for any sign of deterioration by the audible sound of tapping and their appearance. To augment this manual testing, we have been using drones to capture high resolution and thermographic photography of the shells to enable us to identify deterioration or changes on a more frequent basis. The images are imported into the BIM system to create a historical record of the outside surface of the building at high resolution. Long-term, the goal is to use this information to develop machine learning algorithms to pin-point deterioration in the tiles and shell structure. This will be particularly valuable in regular monitoring of the ageing tiles and concrete.

• Using technology to manage upgrades or construction at the Opera House has allowed us to overcome the duplication of information across staff and projects. It has given us more confidence as it has provided us with clearer project deliverables. BIM effectively creates a ‘single source of truth’ where all information from 3D geometry, drawings, data sheets, and schedules are all derived from a single model. Overall, the use of technology has supported our role as custodians to ensure this building can continue to be a world-class performing arts centre and tourist destination for years to come.

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The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.