This building should be familiar to everyone, but perhaps not from this perspective. It’s the Sydney Opera House, which looks white from a distance, but its shells are actually covered in over a million tiles in chevron patterns. These tiles took the architect Utzon three years to design with a Swedish tile manufacturer to reproduce the effect of mosques in the desert which glistened in spite of sand and dust storms. Due to the differing thermal properties of the tiles, concrete, and adhesive, the tiles weren’t able to be attached directly to the concrete. Not one to give up, Utzon came up with an innovative pre-fabrication process where the tile beds were made on the ground, filled with animal glue, the backs covered with galvanized steel mesh and mortar, and then steam cured. Given the high cost overrun of the entire construction process, the tiling cost surprisingly low at $3.95AUD (of course, this was also the 1960s).
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