Darlington public school in Chippendale, Australia, has won the major building design prize at 2024 World Architectural festival in Singapore.
A public school project in Sydney, Australia has beaten off competition from more than 200 shortlisted entrants including multi-storey skyscrapers, major museums and key transport hubs to claim the title of World Building of the Year at the 2024 World Architectural festival in Singapore.
The school was designed by Australian architectural firm FJC Studio and was lauded for celebrating strong connections to Indigenous culture, incorporating designs into the building’s identity and facades. Given that a primary school represents the foundation of a child’s first experience of the world of formal learning, the design concepts for Darlington needed to embody the core values of the school, a community facility with strong connections to Aboriginal people.
Darlington Public School is a true community school and it was important that the publicly accessible functions – the community hall, the COLA – and the library were located so that they became an integrated part of the surrounding urban landscape. The scale of the new hall, responds to the scale of the adjacent church and the library sitting within the landscape provides a softer more organic connection to the community.
The school sits between the large scale of the University of Sydney and the finer grain of the Darlington terraces. The previous school which had reached the end of its life had been a demonstration school, therefore it was important that the spirit of this school was maintained for the community.
Collaboration with educational consultants, New Learning Environments and the school community led to a functional brief providing an inclusive learning environment. Learning hubs, accommodating either two or three student groups, are distributed across two upper levels and feature diverse spaces, including wet areas, presentation spaces, quiet rooms, informal learning areas, teacher hubs and connected outdoor learning terraces.
The design process prioritised a collaborative approach, crucial for integrating the built form and landscape, resolving major cross-falls on the site and a true connection to the landscape.The masterplan divided the construction into two stages, allowing continuous school operation and eliminating relocation costs. Material selection focused on cost-effectiveness, durability and minimised operational expenses.
The design emphasises a connection to landscape and country, embracing sustainability with passive design elements such as sawtooth roofs angled to the sun, high-level glazing for indirect daylight and protective curved screens for filtered daylight. The design embraces the rich indigenous culture and the artistic heritage of the school which is so important to the community.
The extensive collection of aboriginal artworks has been preserved and displayed around the school and provision for QR codes has been provided to enable a continued curation of the works as stories are uncovered.
Murals painted on demolished walls were photographed and reproduced in the cladding, offering a tactile response and adding a new layer of interpretation, preserving stories of the country for future generations.
