Jury citation
The much-awarded Nightingale projects may have their roots in Northern Europe, but they’re now very much a part of the local scene. The “triple-bottom-line” multiple-housing typology, where the architect is also the developer, has been so successful in Melbourne that the waiting list for apartments in these developments remains in the hundreds.
One question for Nightingale Housing to move forward was how it could be upscaled without losing the small-scale, bespoke ethic. In Nightingale Village in Melbourne’s inner-north, we see something of a grand experiment: take six architects and give them the same brief and parameters, and one large, shared site with a shared street between, and see what it can become. This might imply that the result is rooted in chance, which was most certainly not the case. A carefully curated group of some of the country’s best designers assembled to draw from the hits (and misses) of the Nightingales that have gone before to create an urban village. All the familiar elements are there: no personal car-parking spaces but enough spots for share-cars; great passive design; no airconditioning; shared laundries; minimal interior finishes; a location close to multiple public transport routes; and instant community buy-in. What the Village adds (apart from economies of scale that further benefit the owner rather than the developer) is a heightened sense of community. Despite their holistic similarities, all the buildings in the Village are as different as you’d expect from a group of normally competing architects who are suddenly on the same side. These differences lend the owners the ability to, in effect, all play the same sport, but for different teams. We will need a variety of typologies to solve our housing crisis, and while Nightingale provides one, it lays the groundwork for many more.
Nightingale Village is located in Brunswick, Victoria, on Wurundjeri Country, and was reviewed by Alexis Kalagas in Architecture Australia March/April 2023.
Project credits
Architects: Architecture Architecture, Austin Maynard Architects, Breathe, Clare Cousins Architects, Hayball and Kennedy Nolan; Project team: Nick James, Michael Roper, Daria Selleck, Mark Austin, Andrew Maynard, Mark Stranan, Jeremy McLeod, Madeline Sewall, Frances McLennan, Bettina Robinson, Fairley Batch, Bonnie Herring, Ali Galbraith, Emily McBain, Giles Freeman, Marie Penny, Mark Ng, Patricia Bozyk, Renee Eleni Agudelo, Sarah Mealey, Shannon Furness, Clare Cousins, Oliver Duff, Tara Ward, Candice Chan, Laura Norris-Hones, Luc Baldi, Rob Stent, Bianca Hung, James Luxton, Gianni Iacobaccio, Robert Mosca, Yuyen Low, Saifee Akil, Ela Rajapackiyam, Patrick Kennedy, Rachel Nolan, Michael Macleod, Victoria Reeves, Elizabeth Campbell, Tamara Veltre, Oliver Monk; Builder: Hacer Group; Urban planner Hansen Partnerships; Quantity surveyor: WT Partnerships; Engineer: WSP; Building surveyor: Steve Watson and Partners; Access consultant: Access Studio; ESD consultant: WSP, Umow Lai; Wayfinding: Olax; Arborist: Tree Logic; Traffic: GTA Consultants; Waste management: Leigh Design; Landscape and urban design: Openwork; Landscape consultant: Amanda Oliver Gardens, Eckersley Garden Architecture; Project manager: Fontic; Urban design: Breathe, Andy Fergus; ESD consultant: Hip V Hype Sustainability.
