When an unassuming public primary school tucked away in an inner-city Sydney suburb took out the grand prize at the world’s largest architecture festival last month, it made international headlines. Crowned world building of the year, Darlington public school was the second major triumph for FJC Studio in 2024. Two months earlier, the Australian architecture firm had put Liverpool council’s new library, Yellamundie, on the international stage, when it was named one of the world’s four most beautiful libraries.

Both buildings attracted high praise for the way the architects had seamlessly incorporated local First Nations culture and history into their design, a practice an increasing number of Australian architects are prioritising in their work that is making the rest of the world sit up and take notice.

At the world architecture festival – which since its inception in 2008 has become the Venice Biennale of the architecture world – Darlington public school took out best in show, but 10 other Australian architects also collected major awards. Like at the Olympics, Australia is making a habit of punching above its weight in winning architecture gold, says the festival’s founder and the former deputy chair of the UK’s Design Council, Paul Finch.

Only China outperformed Australia at this year’s festival.

“Challenges to architects are also opportunities, because it means that their creativity is pushed and this is what we’re seeing a lot of from Australian architects,” Finch says.

“There’s a particular challenge in any ex-colonial country, a tension with the original populations, and how that is represented and integrated. It’s a challenge for any architect to get people thinking about past culture and history, and even ecology and biology, which may have been either destroyed or heavily amended by the colonial experience.”

Stuart Tanner, the immediate past president of the Australian Institute of Architects, said at this year’s national awards, the role that architecture can play as a vessel for social cohesion in local communities was a dominant theme. Multiple projects where connection to country had been intrinsically included from the design consultation stage onwards were recognised in November.

“We’re getting stronger and stronger engagement with Indigenous place, country and the influence of Indigenous thinking around how buildings work … and how they actually speak to the significance of a place,” he says.

“This is a whole other layer to architecture, which is going to, I believe, elevate Australian architecture to a level far beyond what traditionally people might think architects do.”

Australia’s geographical vastness and its extremes in climate also present unique challenges for architects, says Tanner.

“To be an Australian architect is to be very dexterous. You need to be able to respond to a huge spectrum of situations and to be able to respond cleverly and innovatively.”

Port Hedland’s Spinifex Hill Project Space, a purpose-built art gallery and storage facility designed by Officer Woods Architects, collected the institute’s award for steel architecture in 2024. The remote Western Australia location meant the architects had to come up with a modular design that could be trucked in sections from Perth more than 1,600km away. And it had to be cyclone-proof.

“There were major engineering and architecture challenges in physically making this building,” says Tanner. “But it’s how the building itself has united the community that’s really amazing. It’s created an artistic hub for Indigenous artists that really shows how great architecture, architecture that has a sort of poetry about it, can happen in so many different challenging environments.”

Another standout design in 2024 that won the world festival’s masterplanning category was the city of Melbourne’s Greenline Project.

The project to transform a 4km stretch of the Yarra River’s north bank into a series of interconnected public spaces is being viewed by the designers, Aspect Studios, as a civic act of reconciliation, acknowledging through its design the millennia-old relationship between the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people and the Birrarung (Yarra).

“Greenline is a great example of how we can take lost spaces in our cities and rejuvenate them and reinvigorate them to become places where people want to linger, and in doing so have a meaningful connection to country,” says Tanner.

Another Australian building design recognised on the world stage in 2024 was Australia’s new embassy in Washington DC.

Winning the world festival’s pubic building interiors category, the Bates Smart design has placed an indelible Australian landmark on the US capital’s Massachusetts Avenue, Tanner says.

“It speaks of light. It speaks of authenticity, of materials, textures and place,” he says. “This will steadily play into the type of architecture that is really demonstrating Australian sophistication on a global stage.”

With its LEED gold certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – the world’s most widely used green building rating system), the new embassy demonstrated Australia’s leadership in sustainable design, the festival’s judges said.

On the sustainability front, 2024 marked the year Australia opened its first office tower with a solar skin. The $40m Kennon-designed eight-storey building at 550 Spencer Street in Melbourne is expected to generate more energy than it consumes, through an integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) skin made up of almost 2,000 thin-film solar panels, no thicker than a traditional glass facade.

A collaboration between six Australian architecture firms produced one of several notable environmentally sustainable residential projects in 2024.

A seven-year collaboration between Architecture architecture, Austin Maynard Architects, Breathe, Clare Cousins Architects, Hayball and Kennedy Nolan created Nightingale Village, in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Brunswick.

The collective vision was to create a fossil fuel-free precinct in an inner-city industrial location, providing affordable housing for a diverse community.

To the south of the city, a cluster of 22 carbon-neutral apartments took out the 2024 Frederick Romberg Award for Residential Architecture – Multiple Housing last month.

The Ferrars and York project, by Six Degree Architects, occupies a long narrow site straddling two busy transport corridors.

“They’ve taken a site which has been overlooked for years as just an empty space at the edge of the railway and created some really carefully and intelligently designed units,” says Tanner. “They’ve got beautiful light. They’re beautifully constructed. Thermally, they’re really efficient. But not only that, they’ve created a community.”

On a final note, the London-based architecture, interiors and design magazine Dezeen took the redesign of a tiny cottage in Tasmania and named it one of the world’s top 10 home extensions for 2024.

The Harriet’s House project, which reconfigured a four-room Georgian era stone cottage in the heart of Launceston using locally sourced Tasmanian bricks and Tasmanian oak timber, became the launching pad for emerging young Tasmanian architects Elizabeth Walsh and Alex Nielsen, who earlier this year formed So. Architecture in Hobart.

The couple concede that their first client, Australian historian, curator and professor emerita at RMIT’s in the school of architecture, Harriet Edquist, could have been a daunting one. And the entire construction phase of the project took place during Covid, with Edquist in lockdown on the other side of Bass Strait. There was also the challenge of keeping to the brief of not increasing the actual footprint of the existing 45 sq metre house, and keeping the budget to about $360,000.

“But she loved it, the feeling of space and the connection to the garden,” says Walsh.

“So even though the internal footprint is quite small, when you open up the doors, it just feels continuous … We’ve managed to create this kind of feeling of space in quite a tight site.”