Sydney Opera House, Australia

The roofs of the House are covered with 1.056 million glossy white and matte cream Swedish-made tiles, though from a distance the tiles look only white. Despite their self-cleaning nature, they are still subject to periodic maintenance and replacement.

The Concert Hall and Opera Theatre are each contained in the two largest groups of shells, and the other theatres are located on the sides of the shell groupings. The form of the shells is chosen to reflect the internal height requirements, rising from the low entrance spaces, over the seating areas and up to the high stage towers. A much smaller group of shells set to one side of the Monumental steps houses the Bennelong Restaurant. Although the roof structures of the Sydney Opera House are commonly referred to as shells, they are in fact not shells in a strictly structural sense, but are instead precast concrete panels supported by precast concrete ribs. The building's interior is composed of pink granite quarried in Tarana and wood and brush box plywood supplied from Wauchope in northern New South Wales.