Australian Public School Wins “World Building of the Year” Award

How can architecture change the world? This year’s World Architecture Festival (WAF), held in Singapore’s Marina Bay, provides a glimpse into how design meets visions for the future. In last week’s iteration of the annual festival, launched in 2008, judges recognized international architects’ proposals addressing “major world issues” with the WAFX prize, established in the competition’s tenth year. 

A school in Australia took the coveted World Building of the Year distinction. The Darlington Public School in the Sydney suburb of Chippendale, by FJC Studio, preserves the region’s Indigenous heritages through original mural designs and a community garden that grows Indigenous plants. Sinuous curves and natural light contribute to the brick structure’s organic forms in a concept WAF Program Director Paul Finch called “poetic.” The building was selected from over 200 shortlisted entries and 42 category winners.

Among the shortlisted winners is Islam El Mashtooly, architect and curator of the 2018 Egyptian Pavilion at the Venice Bienniale, who secured a prize in the “Ethics and Values” category for his concept “Resilient Gaza: A Landscape of Resistance.” In a description of the project, his architecture firm Design and More International centers land remediation and self-sufficiency and identifies its client as “humanity.”

“The preceding year of genocidal war on Gazans has brought us to consider a series of critical questions that expand on the idea of what a new landscape of peace could look like in Gaza,” the project statement reads.

Other winners included Filipina architectural designer Gloryrose Dy Metilla’s bandana-shaped vision for a provincial capitol building, Alireza Sherafati and Pantea Eslami’s concept for a women’s gym in Iran, and John Marx’s sphere “portal” for Nevada in the “Experimental” category.

In the “Power and Justice” award category, Metilla of Swito Designs was named a winner for her project “Maguindanao Del Norte Provincial Capitol,” a government building rendered in the form of a Maguindanoan tubaw hand-woven bandana that’s meant to be a “symbol of peace and unity” in the region where the country’s Moro armed conflict has unfolded. Metilla’s design will face east, the direction in which the Maguindanao community leader faces, according to a project statement.

Another winner of the WAFX “Ethics and Values” award addresses post-Iranian Revolution women’s rights in the form of a sports complex dubbed “Shahinshahr Women’s Park.” Architects Sherafati and Eslami of the firm Iranian Arsh 4D Studio challenge the Islamic Republic of Iran’s implementation of women’s only parks, which cropped up after the country’s stark reversal of women’s rights in 1979 and have faced criticism for further secluding and alienating their intended visitors.

“In the face of power and ideology, what role can an architect play? Should one adopt an active or passive approach?” Sherafati and Eslami ask in their project statement. While the design carries the “gene” of the current regime, the architects acknowledge, it attempts to pave the way for change by including spaces where men and women can interact.

“We tried to transform the thick six-meter wall into a border with a dual nature, part of which belongs to the present and part of which is a craving for dreaming the future,” they wrote.

Among the WAFX project winners, the only project in the United States was Form4 Architecture’s “The Portal,” entered into the “Digitial and Technology” category. Lead architect John Marx’s design for a massive spherical hub in Reno embraces the Metaverse technology to function as a “living laboratory” for emerging tools. In addition to screens that resemble a futuristic Times Square, the structure would house an intricate hydroponic system to recycle food waste, a convention center, and residences.

“This year’s winners show how major challenges affecting people and environments generate responses that address functional and social problems while lifting the spirits of those who will benefit from creative architecture and design,” Finch said in a statement.