Opening of the Sydney Opera House
Designed by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon, the Sydney Opera House, with roofs like spread sails, opened after fourteen years of construction.
LindsayAH · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source
In 1957 the design of the 37-year-old Danish architect Jørn Utzon won the competition for a Sydney opera house. Its shell roofs, like sails spread toward the sea, were beautiful, but nobody knew how to build them; after years of work Utzon and the engineers found a way to cut every roof from the surface of a single sphere.
As costs soared to more than ten times the original estimate, Utzon fell out with the government, resigned in 1966 mid-construction and left Australia, never to see the finished building. Queen Elizabeth II opened it on 20 October 1973, and in 2007 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Utzon received architecture’s Pritzker Prize in 2003.