Tracks, beds, cradles and needles: The construction of the sails

Prof. Paolo Tombesi, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFI)
Within ‘normal’ architectural projects, building contractors are not expected to produce large amounts of drawings. In the Sydney Opera House, by contrast, the contractor Hornibrook generated over 5,000 of them, many of which played a major role in the definition of critical details of the building and its development process. The levels of technical sophistication and inventiveness that emerge from their analysis today permit to gauge, in hindsight, the importance of the Australian contribution to the making of the building’s structure and its sails.

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An architect by training, Paolo Tombesi has a long-nurtured interest in the relationship between the intellectual dimension of building and the socio-technical aspects of its physical construction.

He has been the Professor of Construction and Architecture at EPFL, in Switzerland, since 2016. Between 2017 and 2020, he directed the university’s Institute of Architecture and the City. Prior to his appointment, he held the Chair in Construction at the University of Melbourne, where he worked for 20 years and where he retained the Professorship of Building until 2021.

A former Fulbright Fellow, he has a PhD from UCLA on the distribution of technical design knowledge in the building industry. Since 2020, he has been conducting research in collaboration with colleagues Cardellicchio, from the University of New South Wales, and Stracchi, from the University of Sydney, on the technical documentation produced for the Sydney Opera House.