While Nature can produce simple, elegant forms with no apparent effort, man’s attempts to copy her requires highly developed math skills.
In this page I will specifically focus on the Sydney Opera House, for mainly triangles and other elements that came together to form this wonder. Now for a short history lesson. The Sydney Opera House (lets call it SOH for short) is a special monument in modern architecture. The SOH is one of those structures that is ahead of its time, it was a huge advancement in architecture, geometry and technology. Sydney Opera House opened on October 20th 1973. As funny as it sounds, it all started with an orange, and a bunch of nerds. The team was trying to find a repetitive structure which was cost effective. So, coming back to the orange, in a lunchroom conversation the team observed how nature forms a simple geometric shapes from segments of an orange. When they started to use their genius side of their head they designed the SOH's sails, so that's how an orange came to be a world famous monument. Let's see what we can do with a banana next! Now that my horrible history lesson is over we can jump right to the geometry. As we can see there various similar and non-similar triangles in the figure. When the team got the idea from am orange, they peeled parts out of the same sphere (the orange) they were left with shells looking like sails, this gave them the idea for this wonder, Each of the “sails” would be constructed of several identical concrete pieces, or segments. Just as cake layers can be made by pouring batter into a two or more square or round pans and then pieced together to make a larger cake, these sail segments could be formed by pouring concrete into a mold. The sails then could be made by piecing together the segments. And because they were identical, the exterior surface could be covered by mass-produced ceramic tiles identical in shape to each other and with the same curve as the concrete segments. Each of the sails appears to be formed by two curved triangles, each standing on one of its three points and leaning against the other for support. While simple in concept, this requires extremely complex mathematical computations. Each half of a sail consists of a series of these concrete segments. If enough of these segments were joined together, they would form a complete circle because they were purposely formed as pieces of a sphere.Think again of the orange and how its peel covers the spherical orange. These concrete segments form the peel for the Sydney Opera House, only arranged to form the sails rather than a sphere. Within the shells you can what appear to be acute angles and obtuse angles. Although formed from a sphere the shells seem to have the shape of an isosceles triangle. There are panels in the building made up of ceramic tiles. These tiles form tessellations that make repeated diamond patterns. The shells and the panels are supported by a huge rectangular base.