Baaka Cultural and Art Centre Wilcannia wins INDE Learning Space award for rammed earth design

The Baaka Cultural and Art Centre Wilcannia has been recognised as a joint winner of The Learning Space at the INDE.Awards 2026, in coverage published on 27 October 2026 by Indesignlive. It shared the honour in the awards’ tenth year, partnered by Autex Acoustics. The other joint winner, recorded by the architects, was the Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne.

Information verified through 27 October 2026.

Wilcannia is a long way from the usual awards circuit. It’s a small town in far western New South Wales, on Barkandji Country, where the Baaka — the Darling River — bends past. That distance is part of the story. This building wasn’t imported. It was dug, quite literally, out of its own ground.

A fire-damaged store, not a blank site

The centre transforms the fire-damaged remains of the historic Knox and Downs store, the INDE.Awards entry says. The store was built in the late nineteenth century and stayed central to Wilcannia until a fire in 2002 left it derelict, ArchitectureAU reported. It had once served Aboriginal communities, European settlers, Afghan cameleers and Chinese traders.

The architects did not clear that history away. Surviving stone walls were retained and stabilised. Cast-iron verandah columns and brackets were kept, the bullnose verandah form reinstated, a bay window at the Reid Street corner restored, Specifier Source detailed. A stone outbuilding that survived the fire largely intact is now an art workshop.

Board chairperson Janette Bussell put the process in one sentence, quoted in that coverage: the project was created “with us, not to us.”

The rammed earth Keeping Place design at the centre

At the core sits the rammed earth Keeping Place design — an elliptical volume built to house artefacts and culturally significant objects, ArchitectureAU described. It works as anchor and pause: a quiet room inside a permeable, busy building. In the architects’ own account, it sits within a reinstated basement lined with reclaimed stone, lit only from above, with a conversation pit where an elder can sit with a small group of children or visitors.

The new walls are rammed earth formed from soil sourced near the site, the INDE.Awards entry says. Formed as vertically concave panels, they catch changing light and shadow through the day, Specifier Source noted. The material does practical work too. Its thermal mass suits Wilcannia’s extreme climate, and a single material provides structure, enclosure and finished surface at once — no applied linings, less embodied energy.

Don’t read that as rustic styling. It’s a specification choice with consequences: local soil, local labour knowledge, a wall you don’t have to repaint into politeness.

Around the Keeping Place, the plan loosens. Galleries, exhibition areas, artists’ workshops, language learning rooms, visitor facilities and gathering spaces fill the program, Indesignlive and the awards entry both record. The main entrance is on Reid Street. Tourist information, office, kitchen and amenities run along the Myers Street boundary. Verandas, courtyards and shaded outdoor areas handle the rest — places for organised activities and for the unorganised kind, the conversation that starts because someone was passing.

Kaunitz Yeung Architecture cultural centre, co-designed over cups of tea

The Kaunitz Yeung Architecture cultural centre process started long before this award. The origins trace to 2015, when Central Darling Shire Council sought expressions of interest for redeveloping the old store, ArchitectureAU reported. Barkandji Elder and artist William Badger Bates and academic Dr Sarah Martin brought the cultural centre idea forward through community supporter Bob Constantine, who helped the community organise and secure funding, then stepped back.

What followed was co-design, not consultation theatre. David Kaunitz described workshops, forums and “chats over many cups of tea”, with every planning decision and material choice discussed and guided by the community, in ArchitectureAU’s account. Project leaders David Kaunitz and Marni Reti led the work for the practice.

Children got their hands on the building, too. Reti ran workshops where local school kids drew what Country and Wilcannia meant to them. Those drawings became the basis for laser-cut screen designs on the facade. For some community members, the building’s flowing outline reads as the imprint of an emu’s foot and egg. The architects say the geometry follows the river. Both readings are allowed to stand. That’s not indecision — it’s shared authorship, made visible.

Why the Baaka Cultural and Art Centre Wilcannia matters beyond Wilcannia

An INDE.Awards 2026 Learning Space winner that contains no conventional classroom is making a claim. Learning here happens through storytelling, making, language recording and gathering, Indesignlive argued — not only through lessons at desks. The centre is Wilcannia’s first dedicated cultural facility, the awards entry says, and its first dedicated cultural and tourism facility in another of the awards’ own descriptions.

Analysis: Awards usually reward a finished object. This one is harder to photograph as finished, because its makers don’t treat it that way. ArchitectureAU found it still in the process of opening, its full life to emerge through programs, language recording and art-making over time. Board member Frances Dutton called it “a building of hope” that will “hold pieces of old and new together like a bloodline.” If the INDE jury has rewarded anything, it’s patience — a decade of advocacy, a basement the community refused to lose, walls pressed from nearby soil. Plenty of cultural centres announce community engagement. Fewer can point to the children’s drawings cut into the metalwork and say: there, that part is theirs.

Sources

1. https://www.indesignlive.com/articles/baaka-cultural-and-art-centre-the-learning-space-winner-inde-2026
2. https://www.indeawards.com/the-building-2026/baaka-cultural-and-art-centre/
3. https://architectureau.com/articles/baaka-cultural-and-art-centre-by-kaunitz-yeung-architecture/
4. https://www.specifiersource.com.au/news-videos/rammed-earth-and-reclaimed-stone-shape-wilcannias-new-cultural-centre.html