The bulding was undergoing a renovation.
Old building + hot work = frequent fires.
This is how Notre Dam burned. It's how the old Capitol building in Iowa burned. It's how the Yonkers building burned. If you don't like it, the answer isn't to blame a secret cabal that wants to destroy history. THE ANSWER IS TO STOP IMPORTING FUCKING INCOMPETENT IMMIGRANT CONSTRUCTION WORKERS.
Being Denmark, I bet they don’t even rebuild it properly (unlike Notre Dame)…
Seriously, the articles about this couldn’t get more apathetic if they tried. And that is the problem. People no longer care about “irreplaceable cultural heritage”, they just say “Fuck it, it’s old and white people built/painted it. Let it burn.”
At least (some of) the French have national pride…
The Danes? Not so much. From experience...
Funny how this shit always during “on roof restoration work”, when the fucking building is already surrounded in scaffolding, though…
But yeah, never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence, I suppose…
It’ll be the Menin Gate in Belgium (also surrounded by scaffolding), next, I imagine…
Fortunately the Sydney Opera House and Bridge can’t really burn down, so at least those icons of my country are safe, lol…
I can definitely imagine this happening to Flinders Street Station (already did, to Central Station in Sydney), however…
I know the Sydney Opera House gets shit on a bit, and I'm not a huge fan of that style of architecture, but damn if it's not an iconic building. I hope you guys will be able to keep it.
Honestly, it's such a huge block of concrete (mostly) that the only possible way to effectively destroy it would be to demolish it, or like, nuke the city lol. Neither of which seem overly likely...
It's mostly hideous, on the inside (although I haven't been in since the latest "restoration" work), but I will admit that the exteriors are stunning, and the lounge areas at the top of the sails have probably the coolest views in the whole country (you're literally floating/hanging out over the harbour - one of the coolest experiences I've had there). The tradeoff being that the acoustics are shit, which is, again, mostly because the NSW Government of the time sacked Utzon before he could finish it, due to the unbelievably massive cost blowouts...
Anyway, thanks, yeah, I hope so too, lol. It and the Coathanger are two of my favourite things this country has ever built. Though if this -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Coffee_Palace or this -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APA_Building,_Melbourne still existed, it would bump them down my list somewhat.
Saint Mary's Cathedral and the QVB Building, and The Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne, are also pretty iconic, but far less recognized...
Interiors-wise, I think this one - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dymocks_Building,Sydney.jpg and this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Theatre(Sydney) are my favourites. Although the former BankSA building in Adelaide (now a restaurant) is right up there, too.
Walking around the Sydney city centre at dawn, several times, when there was almost no one else around, and just marveling at the architecture, is an experience I won't soon forget.
I will check all of those out.
You know, I've always wondered about the inside of the Opera House but never looked in to it.
It's not a coincidence at all. It had a verdigris roof. Repairs to sheet copper are usually done with lead as a patching compound. It can be easily worked with a torch. But with very old wood, it's pretty easy to ignite something on the other side of the copper, which is a very good thermal conductor.
Ok, fair, but my point was more that if that is the case, why don't they have extra precautions in place in case of fire. Like, if it is that easy for this to happen again, why wasn't there a fuck-tonne of extra preventative measures in place..?
And then there's the question of them leaving all the valuable art inside, during the restoration. Like sure, they obviously didn't plan for this, but I can assure you that would never happen, with an art collection that valuable, in Australia. It just wouldn't. This is why we have temperature and humidity-controlled archives, for precisely this reason...
I'm mostly just appalled at the lack of preventative measures taken once again, more than I am thinking this is some sort of conspiracy...
So for me, while yes the roof thing is obviously the same as Notre Dame, the better comparison would be with the National Museum in Rio, which didn't even have a working sprinkler system (cost), thus resulting in the greatest loss of scientific and historical artifacts this century...
Notre Dame is more iconic than either of the others, but in terms of "cultural loss", it's probably the least important of the three, depending how much art was still in the Stock Exchange building at the time...