Dundee primary school built for £9m wins Stirling prize as judges reward ‘ordinary excellence’

A primary school in Dundee built for £9m on the site of a demolished jute mill has won the Stirling prize for the best building of the year, with judges saying the timber-framed, naturally ventilated school was “proof that the most important architecture in Britain is the kind most people walk past”.

Lochee primary school, designed by the Glasgow practice Ferrier Dunbar, a 14-person studio that had never previously been shortlisted, beat a £240m concert hall in London, a laboratory building in Cambridge and a social housing scheme in Bristol to the award at a ceremony on Thursday night. The school, which opened in August 2025 for 420 pupils, is built almost entirely from Scottish-grown spruce, has no mechanical cooling, and cost £2,140 a square metre, roughly two-thirds of the average for a new school in the UK.

The chair of the judging panel said the building was “ordinary in the best sense: it does the job a school needs to do, in a neighbourhood that needed it done well, and it does it with a grace that makes you want to be seven again”. The judges singled out the school’s single-storey plan, in which every classroom opens on to a sheltered courtyard, and a central hall with a timber roof that the practice’s co-founder, Catriona Ferrier, described as “a barn with ambitions”.

Ferrier said the brief from Dundee city council had been “unusually honest”: the council had told the practice what it could afford and asked what was possible, rather than the reverse. “Most school buildings in this country are designed by the budget,” she said. “This one was designed by the question of what a child in Lochee deserves, and then we made the budget fit. It turns out that is cheaper.” The school’s headteacher, Alan Buchan, said pupil attendance had risen four percentage points since the move from the Victorian building it replaced, and that the courtyards were “in use in weather that would have had us indoors before”.

The win was not universally applauded. One prominent London architect, who asked not to be named, said the award had become “a prize for virtue rather than architecture” and that the shortlisted concert hall was “a building that will be visited in 100 years, which a primary school in Dundee, however lovely, will not”. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, which runs the award, said the comment “rather makes the judges’ point for them”.

The result continues a pattern in recent years of the prize going to modestly budgeted public buildings outside London, and Ferrier Dunbar said it had already received enquiries from three local authorities. “We are 14 people,” Ferrier said. “We will have to say no to some of them, which is a sentence I have never said before.”

The school will hold an open day for the public on 25 October.