First ' World Building of the Year'.

This competition-winning building for Universita Luigi Bocconi, the leading Italian business school, took pride of place at the inaugural World Architecture Festival held in Barcelona at the end of October. Designed by Dublin-based Grafton Architects, the stone-clad building is a sophisticated re-examination of certain 1960s urban megastructures, sliding effortlessly into the heavyweight context of central Milan.

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The fundamental design concepts were firstly to locate the offices for about 1000 professors in a linked block at the top of the complex, and then to create an 'aula magna' at the corner of the building, making an explicit connection with the city and the street. The sectional and structural ingenuity of the proposal attracted the judges, who admired the strong dialogue of the building with its context, and its 'physical and conceptual density'; this was a building with a 'potential narrative deriving from the solidity of the architecture', and which opened eyes to new ways of thinking about the architecture of the 1960s.