The engineer who led the structural design of the Sydney Opera House roof was Ove Arup.
Arup’s firm worked with architect Jørn Utzon to turn the roof’s dramatic sketches into buildable structures. The roof appears to consist of curved shells, but its final form uses precast concrete panels supported by precast concrete ribs. Finding a workable geometry took years of experiments with parabolas, ellipsoids and other shapes.
In 1961, the team adopted sections of a sphere. This allowed roof components to be made from repeated curved elements rather than requiring entirely unique formwork for every section. Engineers also used some of the earliest computer-assisted structural analysis on the project to calculate forces and locate shell segments accurately.
Ove Arup was the leading figure, but the achievement was collaborative. Engineers including Peter Rice and Ronald Jenkins made major contributions, while Utzon supplied the architectural concept. That is why Peter Rice sometimes appears in accounts of the roof’s development, but Arup remains the standard answer to the question asking which engineer led the structural design.