In an unexpected turn, a modest Aussie school has beaten hundreds of iconic architecture giants across the globe to be crowned the ‘World Building of the Year’.
Darlington Public School, tucked in the quiet Sydney suburb of Chippendale, took on more than 220 shortlisted entries from some of the world’s best architecture projects to snag the top prize at the World Architecture Festival (WAF) in Singapore on Friday, 8 November.
Despite some stiff competition, including the spaceship-like National Star Observatory of Cyprus and an impressive solar power plant in Turkey, judges said that Darlington’s unique design – helmed by the Sydney-based firm fjcstudio – captured the hearts of voters and audience members alike.
Opened earlier this year to students, the project wowed festival goers with a striking angular brick campus building, featuring a distinctive sawtooth roof, with landscaped outdoor spaces, including a large basketball court and a community garden enclosed by softy curved metal screens for protecting students’ privacy.
The Sydney site had long been home to a school, but with the original building starting to show its age, the winning design studio behind the project, fjcstudio, says the school was “no longer fit for purpose”.
Now housing a preschool, kindergarten and primary school, the new campus will be able to accommodate more than 500 students, according to the school’s website, with a two-stage building process meaning classes were able to continue throughout construction.
Little school, big heart
But the idea behind the redesign wasn’t intended to wow judges or bring in awards. According to the fjcstudio team, this “radical transformation” was transformed to offer students and faculty a “new and contemporary learning environment”, while also honouring the area’s storied Indigenous heritage.
The design firm says they helped preserve this “strong connection to Aboriginal people” by putting Indigenous art in the school hall, entrance reception and classrooms, and even including some of the old building’s original artwork into the new cladding.
The World Building of the Year was selected from the 18 winners across the awards categories, spanning sport, transportation, health and housing. as chosen by a panel of 175 festival delegates.
Friday’s result also marks the second time a Sydney building has won the award in the past three years, after Quay Quarter Tower — dubbed the world’s first “upcycled” skyscraper for retaining two-thirds of an old high-rise on the site — won in 2022.
Other recent winners include a housing complex for senior citizens in Singapore and a waste-to-energy power plant with a rooftop ski slope in Copenhagen, Denmark.
“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,” says Alessandro Rossi, an associate at fjcstudio.
“The real winners are the children who will spend time in the building — a place of enrichment for many years to come.”
