2018 Gallery
Winner: Sustainability
Breathe Architecture for Nightingale 1
Homes built for people, not profit.
Nightingale 1 is the inaugural project of the Nightingale Model. A replicable, triple bottom line housing model with an overarching priority towards social, economic and environmental sustainability. At it’s heart, Nightingale is all about people. Its architecture serves as a catalyst to building community.
Jury Citation
Nightingale 1 is the beginning of an ambitious experiment that aims to shift the status quo of apartment design in Australia. It is the commitment and self-belief, plus the tireless campaigns, that make this project so successful, sustainably.
Nightingale 1 achieves all the standard environmental sustainability benchmarks, however, it is the social and economic elements that make it a sustainability masterpiece: generous communal amenities, useable public space, alternative finance structure and clever and efficient construction techniques. The project also attains carbon-neutral operation using a fossil fuel-free embedded network.
In addition to all its design and sustainability credentials, the building and its apartments are elegantly designed and comfortable. The glam-without-the-glam detailing is omnipresence – there is delight in the rawness of the materials and textures as soon as you enter the ground-floor lobby.
The building encourages its inhabitants to lead a more sustainable lifestyle through the sharing of laundry facilities, growing vegetables, learning to work together as a community rather than as just a household, and taking the train or riding a bike to work.
Nightingale 1 aims to use architecture “as a catalyst to building community.” For this reason, it is an undoubtedly impressive example of sustainable architecture.
