Sydney Opera House

One of the world's great icons, it was the Sydney Opera House that brought Arup to Australia in 1963. With its expressionist modern design consisting of large, precast concrete 'shells', it was a project that few firms considered due to its complexity. However Arup undertook the structural design and supervised the construction - ensuring that nearly every Arup engineer throughout the world was busy working towards its completion.

One of the first examples of the use of computer analysis to design complex buildings, the Sydney Opera House was a radical concept and paved the way in design, planning and execution for the complex geometries of some modern architecture.