An Australian public school has been named the World Building of the Year in a prestigious architecture competition.
Darlington Public School, in Sydney‘s Inner West, was given the title by the World Architecture Festival in Singapore on Friday.
The highly-coveted prize was selected from winners across the festival’s 18 categories – including sport, transportation, health and housing.
Darlington Public School opened its new brick campus building last autumn.
It features a ‘sawtooth’ roof and large, curved metal screens that allow students inside to enjoy natural light while offering privacy.
The designers of the upgraded school, FJC Studio, also included several landscaped outdoor spaces, a basketball court and community garden.
Darlington Public School’s former 1970s building was declared no longer fit for purpose shortly before FJC Studio was tasked with offering ‘new and contemporary learning environments’.
The Sydney-based architects said they ‘radically transformed’ the school while keeping its ‘strong connections to Aboriginal people’.
Darlington Public School (pictured), in Sydney’s inner-west, was named World Building of the Year by the World Architecture Festival on Friday
Indigenous artwork is featured throughout the school hall, entrance reception and classrooms.
Original Aboriginal murals that were painted on the 1970s building were also reproduced on the new building’s cladding.
The new school was built using a two-stage process, meaning its students from preschool to primary school were able to continue their classes throughout construction.
The World Building of the Year was chosen by a panel of 175 festival delegates from several major projects around the globe, including the National Star Observatory of Cyprus, a Polish bus station and a solar power plant in Turkey.
This year was the second consecutive year the WAF judges selected an educational building.
Alessandro Rossi, associate at FJC Studio, said of the win: ‘It’s very humbling given the modest scale of the building – it’s a little school project, so to have won against all the other big projects at WAF is a testament to the client and the community engagement that helped drive the design process.
‘The real winners are the children who will spend time in the building – a place of enrichment for many years to come.’
FJC Studio previously won the prize in 2013 – making it the first firm to win the award twice.
Darlington Public School (pictured) opened its new brick campus, designed by FJC Studio, building last autumn
The school (pictured) features a ‘sawtooth’ roof and large, curved metal screens that allow students inside to enjoy natural light while offering privacy
Other former winners include a senior citizen housing complex in Singapore, a waste-to-energy power plant with a rooftop ski slope in Denmark and a boarding school in China.
Festival program director Paul Finch said FJC Studio’s design for the school ‘generated a reading of the history of place, culture and time’.
‘The result of the project is poetic, a building in which topography and landscape, inside and outside, form and materials, flow seamlessly in an unexpectedly delightful way,’ he said.
‘It is also an inspirational proposition about the acknowledgement and reconciliation of historic difference – a pointer to brighter, better futures for all.’
Australian architects took 12 other awards from the festival – including the Parramatta Aquatic Centre for best sports building and the Nightingale Village apartments in Melbourne’s hip Brunswick suburb for best housing building.
