Designed by Kyriakos Tsolakis Architects to perch prominently on a peak in the Troodos Mountains, the building always intended to provide more than a high-tech vantage point to view the heavens. The observatory also wanted to deliver ‘the Bilbao effect’, architecture’s much-sought-after holy grail. The phenomenon was first attributed to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum: cultural investment plus a piece of showy architecture transforms, revitalises and provides economic uplift to its location.

Some claim Gehry’s Guggenheim as the father of “iconic” architecture — “the prolific progenitor of countless odd-shaped buildings the world over” as The Guardian’s Rowan Moore put it, noting that rarely, if ever, have the myriad wannabe Bilbaos matched the original. On paper, the museum’s statistics look impressive. Since its opening in 1997, it’s had more than 20 million visitors, mainly foreign tourists, and has created around 4500 jobs, mainly in transportation and hospitality.

But is the ‘Bilbao effect’ a genuine phenomenon or, as Rethinking The Future puts it, “a cooked up narrative, a clever strategy to promote already famous architects, and obnoxious, often useless designs”? Architecture and design critic of the Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote, goes further. “The thing about the Bilbao effect is that it is a myth. You could just as well call it the Sydney Opera House effect, the Pompidou effect, or dozens of other effects. Bilbao wasn’t the first city to be transformed by a self-consciously iconic building and it won’t be the last.” Lorenzo Vicario in Apollo Magazine says critics claim the museum is simply “a trans-national corporation’s ‘franchise’, financed and owned by the Basque administration but ‘remote-controlled’ from New York by the Guggenheim Foundation; a museum that is a mere showcase, but contributes nothing to cultural production per se”. Heathcote argues that the idea of the Bilbao effect is a massive oversimplification. “Bilbao was already undergoing a period of radical change… The city was completely rethinking its public spaces, and a sophisticated contemporary culinary culture was emerging. The Guggenheim was the olive in the martini — highly visible — but not the main event.

Heathcote says the tendency to attribute too much to a single building has become a burden, with every cultural institution now having to make claims to regenerate a city or to transform a derelict dockland. In trying to achieve too much, he says, architects can forget the most important things. “In the obsession with creating a form that is easily instagrammable, an architecture that acts as instant urban logo, the detail is lost. Architecture is not sculpture; it is not the creation of an extravagant form of rebranding. Rather, if it is to have a real and lasting value, it needs to be woven carefully into the complex fabric and grain of the city and to understand the way people move through the street.”

Back at the World Architecture Festival, a Bilbao-like narrative is certainly being woven around the National Star Observatory and the steadily depopulating local community of Agridia.

The €1.7-million project is funded by the local community, the Cypriot government and the European Union. The architects said it was important “to create a positive ripple effect to the economy of the surrounding area” and that they “sought to create a memorable landmark that will be an attractor in its own right, bringing people to the region and creating a micro economy around it”.

The super jury, chaired by Sonali Rastogi with Emre Arolat, Mario Cucinella and Ian Ritchie, didn’t seem impressed. One asked a question about the choice of materials for the reflective exterior.

The architects said it was designed to blend seamlessly with the surrounding skies to bring focus to the building’s purpose, to “reflect our civilisation’s spirit for exploring the universe and understanding our existence within it”.

The jury didn’t seem to buy it. Fjcstudio’s Darlington Public School, in the Sydney suburb of Chippendale, took out the top award. The building both conserves and showcases aboriginal artwork displayed in the classrooms, hall and reception entranceway, and features tall, beautifully curved screens sheltering stairwells and “learning verandahs”.

But perhaps a special award should go to fjcstudio design director Richard Francis-Jones’ dulcet tones laden with gravitas as he talked about the building’s connection with First Nations people, its culturally inclusive narrative, collaborative design process and embrace of the school’s indigenous history. While his resonant, rhythmic delivery may have mesmerised the jury, the real strength of the scheme was in its engagement with its local community.

As the citation noted, it presented “an inspirational proposition about the acknowledgement and reconciliation of historic difference”. It also shows the power of not just having a good architectural story but, also, being able to tell it, not just sell it.