A humble suburban school in Australia has fended off competition from skyscrapers, museums and airport terminals to be named World Building of the Year 2024.

Darlington Public School, in the Sydney suburb of Chippendale, beat more than 220 other shortlisted designs to win the coveted annual prize at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore on Friday.

Opened last fall, the project combines an angular brick campus building, featuring a distinctive “sawtooth” roof, with landscaped outdoor spaces, including a large basketball court and a community garden. Softly curved metal screens surround a series of open-air terraces, allowing daylight to filter in while protecting students’ privacy.

A school had long been on the south Sydney site, though the old 1970s building was no longer fit for purpose, according to fjcstudio, the design firm behind the project.

The Sydney-based architects said their new design had “radically transformed” the school to offer “new and contemporary learning environments,” though the project was intended to “capture the spirit” of the original campus.

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. A two-stage building process meant classes were able to continue throughout construction.

In its project description, fjcstudio said Darlington Public School had “strong connections to Aboriginal people”.

The design firm said it helped preserve this cultural heritage by putting indigenous art in the school hall, entrance reception and classrooms. Aboriginal murals that had been painted on the old school’s walls were meanwhile reproduced in the new building’s cladding.

The light and airy school is complete with distinctive “sawtooth” roof and landscaped outdoor spaces.
Photo: CNN / Brett Boardman

Speaking after Friday’s announcement, Alessandro Rossi, associate at fjcstudio, said it was “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.”

This year marked the 17th edition of WAF, which divides its awards into 18 categories, spanning sport, transportation, health and housing. The World Building of the Year was selected from the winners of each category, as chosen by a panel of 175 festival delegates.

Other projects in contention for the top prize included the National Star Observatory of Cyprus, a Polish bus station and a solar power plant in Turkey.

Friday’s result marks the second consecutive year that the WAF judges opted for an educational building, with a serene boarding school in China taking last year’s title.

Darlington Public School is also the second Sydney building to win 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.

– CNN