Metropolitan Opera House – 1955 – Wallace K Harrison Harrison’s first ideas for the Met were fantastical. One of his earliest sketches looked similar to the Sydney Opera House; another presented a wavelike building on stilts above a reflecting pool. His most absurd version was surely the Met as a gigantic Roman foot, its base resembling a narrow stone ankle, spreading apart until its toes formed the looping curtain walls that today mark the front of the structure. But after almost 50 proposals, project patron John D Rockefeller and the board finally accepted the least visionary of them all