The Sydney-based practice won World Building of the Year at WAF for the Darlington Public School, a community school on the outskirts of Sydney with ‘a strong connection to Aboriginal people embodied in its redesign’.

The practice was crowned winner at the festival, which took place last week (6-8 November) in Singapore.

FJC Studio previously won best building in 2013, for The New Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, an ‘extensive public project’ which included restoration, new build and landscaping.

The WAF said that its Darlington Public School ‘seamlessly connects to its surroundings’, providing glimpses of its inner courtyard from the main entrance and a publicly accessible community hall, covered outdoor learning area, and library.

Source:Brett Boardman

The building continued to operate during construction ‘minimising time, cost and disruption’. It incorporates passive design through elements such as a sawtooth roof, high-level glazing, and curved screens to filter daylight.

WAF said Darlington’s ‘inclusive learning environment … embraces the rich indigenous culture’. Developed alongside the school community, it includes conserved aboriginal artworks and a community garden with indigenous plants to teach students cooking and culture.

Last year the prize also went to a school project: Huizhen High School, a floating forest school in China by Bejing-based Approach Design Studio in collaboration with the Zhejiang University of Technology Engineering Design Group.

Source:WAF

2023 Winner: Huizhen High School by Approach Design Studio and Zhejiang University of Technology Engineering Design Group

FJCstudio said winning the 2024 award was ‘very humbling given the modest scale of the building’.

Practice associate Alessandro Rossi said: ‘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 design process.

‘The real winners are the children who will spend time in the building – a place of enrichment for many years to come.’

WAF programme director Paul Finch said that, despite the ‘very high quality’ of this year’s finalists, the WAF jury reached a unanimous decision on the project ‘relatively easily’.

The jury praised FJCstudio’s work to explore and extend the client’s formal programme ‘to include the views and experience of the local community and a variety of users’.

Finch said their efforts ‘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.’

The 2024 jury was chaired by Sonali Rastogi, and included Emre Arolat, Mario Cucinella and Ian Ritchie.

Other WAF awards included Future Project of the Year, which went to Küçükçekmece Djemevi in Turkey by EAA-Emre Arolat Architecture, a civic building which ‘addresses the marginalisation of the Alevi community’.

The Cultural Building category was won by Renzo Piano Building Workshop with its Istanbul Modern, which opened in May 2023.

The Shopping category, meanwhile, went to Stiff+Trevillion’s Newson’s Yard, a renovated builder’s yard on Pimlico Road in London.

Other UK-based winners included Stanton Williams (retrofit – complete) FaulknerBrowns (sport – complete), Woods Bagot (education – proposed) and RSHP (residential – proposed).

Source:Brett Boardman