Laureates – "Winners announced for WAN AWARDS Education sector 2010"

This year’s WAN AWARDS education sector was even more hotly contested than last year with another record level of entries. The geographic spread of projects covered the globe and the scale ranged from a small kindergarten in Italy to a vast Faculty of Law Complex in Sydney. The cement between the disparate schemes other than education was good design. Jury member Deborah Saunt confirmed the mood of the room when she said ‘the quality of the shortlist was unbelievable.’

Of course at shortlist level, it’s always more than that. Most of the entries were good designs but of the twelve entries in the two shortlists, (built and un-built) almost all had that little bit of magic. It might have been an original layout such as Luca Peralta’s design, which clearly had some ethereal womb-like characteristic created by the curvaceous central courtyard which had the jurors woo-ing. This type of emotion stirring design was summed up nicely by a not untypical comment from Deborah on the judging process: “we really have to balance our interests in the architecture…what it would be like as a user, as a student, child or member of the public.”