The Nightingale model is scalable and replicable: it is not specific to a particular site or design, and can be rolled out across every city in Australia (hell, the world!). One can only imagine the skulduggery that people will get up to in future to get their hands on one of the apartments, but the point is that this is not an investment property which can be flipped to turn a quick buck. The cap removes any incentive to increase profit by squeezing quality, and there’s also a limit on how much apartments will be able to be sold for – for twenty years they can only be sold for the average price rise in the suburb on top of their purchase price. But these are small investors, and their profits are capped at 15%, not the usual developers’ minimum of 20%. These savings are passed on to buyers.Īny big construction project still needs financiers, and Nightingale 1.0 has twenty five of them, in addition to the future homeowners themselves, and the architects in the collective. It then goes further – by connecting directly with potential owner-occupiers it cuts out the marketing budget, relinquishing the need for an expensive display suite, or real estate agents. The Nightingale Model works on the same principle of paring back construction costs (the lack of car parking has been controversial, but if you don’t have a car, and you do have a train, a tram, and a bike path outside your door, then it seems like a no brainer). This shift is the real genius here: moving beyond an architectural model to a financial one, redesigning the funding process before designing any building. It was at this point that McLeod and his collaborators made their revolutionary move, beyond The Commons (a building, albeit a very good one) to what they call the Nightingale Model (a financial paradigm). It has the middle-class fairytale allure of beehives on the roof and a yoga studio on the ground floor – I’d love to live there myself.īut, as McLeod candidly says, it was a failure in financial terms: the global financial crisis meant that the consortium of architects couldn’t borrow the money for construction, so they had to find an “ethical developer” at the last moment, and thus relinquished the control that they had set out to achieve in the first place. It pretty much scooped the pool at the Victorian and national architecture awards in 2014, and is universally admired as a case study in sustainable housing. The Commons was a success in design terms. Victoria doesn’t have New South Wales’s invaluable SEPP 65 controls on minimum design quality in apartments – and in Melbourne the overheated property market has led to the construction of some truly terrible high-rise housing.īy making strategic savings in some construction costs (no air conditioning, no basement car park, single bathrooms and communal laundry), following basic passive environmental design principles (double glazing, designing to admit or exclude sunlight according to season) and by avoiding environmentally costly materials (ceramic tiles, chrome tapwear), apartments could be cheaper to buy and to run, more sustainable, with a high level of spatial and design quality – and the added bonus of creating a community of like-minded individuals. The answer is certainly not more suburban sprawl, but it’s also not necessarily high-density high rise. McLeod has recorded a wonderful TEDx talk which explains his thinking better than I ever could, but the conundrum is this: Melbourne (and by extension, all of Australia) will experience massive growth over the next decades – but where will these people live? And perhaps more importantly, how will they live? The story begins with Jeremy McLeod, founder and director of Breathe Architecture. But when, last week, site work finally began on the architect-led, affordable, high-quality “deep green” housing development known as Nightingale 1.0, I was wildly enthused. The architectural community has been watching closely, and with excitement. It started small, with a group of architects in Melbourne, but has the potential to transform the way urban housing is conceived, funded, and designed across the country. A quiet revolution is happening in housing development in Australia.
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