An Australian public school has been named World Building of the Year in a prestigious architectural competition.
Darlington Public School, in Sydney’s inner west, received the title on Friday at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore.
The coveted award was selected from the winners of the festival’s 18 categories, including sport, transportation, health and housing.
Darlington Public School opened its new brick building last fall.
It features a sawtooth-shaped roof and large curved metal screens that allow students to enjoy natural light while offering privacy.
The designers of the improved school, FJC Studio, also included several landscaped outdoor spaces, a basketball court and a community garden.
Darlington Public School’s former 1970s building was declared unusable shortly before FJC Studio was tasked with delivering “new and contemporary learning environments”.
The Sydney-based architects said they “radically transformed” the school while maintaining its “strong Aboriginal connections”.
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 displayed throughout the school hall, entrance reception and classrooms.
The original Aboriginal murals that were painted on the 1970s building were also reproduced on the cladding of the new building.
The new school was built through a two-stage process, meaning its preschool through elementary school students were able to continue their classes during construction.
World Building of the Year was chosen by a panel of 175 festival delegates from several major projects around the world, including Cyprus’ National Star Observatory, a Polish bus station and a solar power plant in Turkey.
This year was the second year in a row that WAF judges selected an educational building.
Alessandro Rossi, associate at FJC Studio, said of the win: “It’s humbling given the modest scale of the building; it’s a small school project, so to have won against all the other big WAF projects is a testament to the client and community involvement 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 award in 2013, making it the first company to win the award twice.
Darlington Public School (pictured) opened its new brick campus, designed by FJC Studio, and was built last fall.
The school (pictured) features a sawtooth roof and large curved metal screens that allow students to enjoy natural light while also offering privacy.
Other previous winners include a senior 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, interior and exterior, form and materials, flow seamlessly in an unexpectedly charming way,” he said.
“It is also an inspiring proposition about recognizing and reconciling historical differences – a marker of better, brighter futures for all.”
Australian architects took home 12 other festival awards, including the Parramatta Aquatic Center for best sports building and the Nightingale Village Apartments in the trendy Melbourne suburb of Brunswick for best residential building.