Singapore
NCS
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A humble suburban school in Australia has fended off competitors from skyscrapers, museums and airport terminals to be named World Building of the Year 2024.
Darlington Public School, within the Sydney suburb of Chippendale, beat greater than 220 different shortlisted designs to win the coveted annual prize on the World Architecture Festival in Singapore on Friday.
Opened final fall, the challenge combines an angular brick campus building, that includes a particular “sawtooth” roof, with landscaped outside areas, together with a big basketball court docket and a group backyard. Softly curved steel screens encompass a sequence of open-air terraces, permitting daylight to filter in whereas defending college students’ privateness.
A school had lengthy been on the south Sydney website, although the previous Seventies building was not match for goal, in line with fjcstudio, the design agency behind the challenge. The Sydney-based architects said their new design had “radically transformed” the school to supply “new and contemporary learning environments,” although the challenge was meant to “capture the spirit” of the unique campus.
Housing a preschool, kindergarten and first school, the new campus will likely be in a position accommodate greater than 500 college students, in line with the school’s web site. A two-stage building course of meant courses have been in a position to proceed all through development.
In its challenge description, fjcstudio mentioned Darlington Public School had “strong connections to Aboriginal people.” The design agency mentioned it helped protect this cultural heritage by placing indigenous artwork within the school corridor, entrance reception and school rooms. Aboriginal murals that had been painted on the previous school’s partitions have been in the meantime reproduced within the new building’s cladding.
Speaking after Friday’s announcement, Alessandro Rossi, affiliate at fjcstudio, mentioned: “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. The real winners are the children who will spend time in the building — a place of enrichment for many years to come.”
This yr marked the seventeenth version of WAF, which divides its awards into 18 classes, spanning sport, transportation, well being and housing. The World Building of the Year was chosen from the winners of every class, as chosen by a panel of 175 pageant delegates. Other tasks in competition for the highest prize included the National Star Observatory of Cyprus, a Polish bus station and a solar energy plant in Turkey.
Friday’s consequence marks the second consecutive yr that the WAF judges opted for an academic building, with a serene boarding school in China taking final yr’s title. Darlington Public School can also be the second Sydney building to win up to now three years, after Quay Quarter Tower — dubbed the world’s first “upcycled” skyscraper for retaining two-thirds of an previous high-rise on the positioning — gained in 2022.
Other current winners embrace a housing complex for senior citizens in Singapore and a waste-to-energy energy plant with a rooftop ski slope in Copenhagen, Denmark.