Nightingale Village | Architecture architecture, Austin Maynard Architects, Breathe, Clare Cousins Architects, Hayball and Kennedy Nolan

The Allan and Beth Coldicutt Award for Sustainable Architecture

While the Nightingale model, with its restrained material palette and shared facilities, is already highly lauded, the jury felt that this project, which escalates the scale of the model to the village precinct delivers outstanding results. These impacts are felt across both the industry and people’s day-to-day lives.

The jury was impressed with Nightingale Village as an example of leadership and action in the face of global warming, with the architects self-organising to overcome established market expectations and lending parameters to deliver a precinct of high social and environmental quality. They demonstrate the meaning that can be derived when we are free to challenge commercial models.

Including a wide range of Melbourne’s architects in the project promotes new models of collaboration and reflects a certain generosity. It ensures the dissemination of knowledge relating to delivering environmentally responsible buildings through the local design community. The range of practices involved in the project also resulted in a diversity of ideas including dog runs, bath houses, bookable guest suites and precinct resource management. This project considers the social life of the people that live there, encouraging delight in lower footprint living behaviours through minimal car usage, electrification and shared facilities.

Award for Urban Design

Nightingale Village is a considered urban design response to the fraught question of how to live comfortably together in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. Comprised of six buildings adjacent to the train line in Brunswick, Nightingale Village is a welcoming, fine-grain extensive development that offers a sustainable alternative to the often opaque and monolithic high-density residential model that surrounds it.

The success of the design lies in the design team’s ability to solve complex problems at a multitude of scales. At the city scale, the development actively leverages its large size(203 dwellings) to maximise its environmental response through the sharing of services and amenities.

It manages to do this without exclusion or privatising adjacent spaces. Nightingale Village feels like a continuation of the surrounding residential fabric, albeit at a taller scale. Six architects have each designed a unique and finely tuned building that forms an authentic new Brunswick neighbourhood. Balconies, courtyards and active shopfronts line interfaces giving the precinct a sense of life while offering passive surveillance.

The pedestrian scale is elegantly considered, from integrated seating ledges to playful letterboxes ensuring the spaces between buildings feels safe and inviting.

This excellent project is the result of a rich multidisciplinary collaboration. It sets a high standard for the development of multi-residential buildings in Melbourne and encourages big conversations around title boundaries, setbacks and precincts.

Award Residential Architecture – Multiple Housing

The Nightingale Village is more than the sum of its parts, a social enterprise that acts as a community hub for its inhabitants while reinvigorating the local precinct more broadly. Prioritising communal spaces and collective amenity, the development is anchored by a highly social landscaped laneway that bisects the site, acting as a social incubator and allowing interaction between apartments and buildings.

The six individually designed buildings are highly coloured and detailed, each offering a distinctly personalised approach yet united by a subtle thread of recurrent detailing. The ethos of financial affordability, environmental and social sustainability provides a prototype for high density urban living.