When Ove Arup first learned about Jørn Utzon’s imaginative, lyrical concept for a new Opera House in Sydney, he immediately offered to help.

He had established his firm of consulting engineers, Ove Arup & Partners (now simply Arup) in London, specifically to help modernist architects realise their ideas. His partner Ronald Jenkins was world renowned for the design of thin concrete shells, so an Utzon-Arup collaboration appeared to be perfect, and so, after many twists and turns, it proved to be.

Working intimately together the two Danes wrestled with integrating the beautiful but irrational initial geometry into a constructable building. This was finally resolved by Jørn’s decision to use a spherical geometry that unlocked the engineering and construction of this world icon.

The design of the Sydney Opera House can be seen as the prototypical architect + engineer collaboration, what Renzo Piano later referred to as “playing ping pong”, bouncing ideas backwards and forwards until an integrated whole emerges.

–

Tristram Carfrae is one of Arup’s Deputy Chairs and an Arup Fellow. He chairs our Digital Executive and sponsors our strategy for being excellent in all that we do. A structural engineer by practice, he has contributed to many award-winning buildings, including the Water Cube for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. He currently leads Arup’s team helping complete Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona using digital fabrication and modern methods of construction.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) in 2006, and received the Institution of Structural Engineers' Gold Medal in 2014 and IABSE's International Award of Merit in Structural Engineering in 2018.