Nightingale Village, Urban Coup
Architecture architecture worked in collaboration with Breathe Architecture and Hayball on the design and delivery of a Nightingale co-housing development for Urban Coup, within Brunswick’s Nightingale Village.
Urban Coup are a deliberative housing community who aim to live together in more socially integrated ways. Such communities are typically formed in rural areas and on the urban fringes where developments have room to sprawl across the earth. Constructed in the inner-north of Melbourne, close to services and public transport, Urban Coup is the first vertical community of its kind in Australia.
| Location | Brunswick |
| Completed | 2022 |
| Budget | $12m |
| Awards | 2023, National Architecture Awards, David Oppenheim Award for Sustainable Architecture |
| 2023, National Architecture Awards, Frederick Romberg Award for Multiple Housing | |
| 2023, National Architecture Awards, Commendation for Urban Design | |
| 2023, Victorian Architecture Awards, Dimity Reed Melbourne Prize | |
| 2023, Victorian Architecture Awards, Urban Design Award | |
| 2023, Victorian Architecture Awards, Multiple Housing Award | |
| 2023, Victorian Architecture Awards, A. & B. Coldicutt Award for Sustainable Architecture | |
| 2023, Melbourne Design Awards, Environmental Sustainability, Gold | |
| 2023, Melbourne Design Awards, Mult-residential Architecture, Silver | |
| 2023, INDE Awards, Best Of The Best, winner | |
| 2023, INDE Awards, Multi-Residential Building, winner | |
| 2023, Urban Developer Awards, Design Innovation, winner. | |
| 2023, Urban Developer Awards, Decarbonisation in Real Estate, winner. | |
| Video | Urban Coup community living |
| Construction | Hacer Group |
| Landscape | Openwork |
| Photography | Tom Ross |
| Details | See communal facilities diagram |
Beyond the scope of a typical housing development, the Urban Coup development includes communal kitchen and dining facilities, workshop spaces, a yoga room, music room and productive rooftop gardens.
Architecture architecture have worked extensively with the future residents of Urban Coup—a client base of 50—running regular workshops and surveys to ensure the design supports the lifestyle they desire. In collaboration with the residents, the building has been designed to foster a resilient, integrated community, providing an architecture that supports connection with the local neighbourhood, integration with the Nightingale Village, and the creation of a supportive, familial community within the building itself. In social sustainability terms, there is no other Nightingale building like it.
Verner Panton, Multi-Level Lounger, 1964
Verner Panton, Multi-Level Lounger, 1964
The Multi-Level Lounger
Verner Panton’s simple yet elegant ‘multi-level lounger’ communicates so much of what we are striving for in our architecture. It stands as a built diagram of the communal life, where people are brought together in a three-dimensional matrix of spaces: adjacent, above, across, below.
It represents the diametric affordances of all good architecture: both the opportunity to gather, and to retreat. To gather with friends, colleagues, family; or to retreat from the world into a place of quiet comfort. It’s a provocation for what might be possible in the arrangement of our homes, our workplaces, our public spaces, both at the macro scale and the micro.
It is also an exemplar of clarity in form-making – doing no more than it needs. And yet, there’s a sparkle in its eye. It isn’t like anything else we know. Just looking at it, we begin to imagine our lives differently.
Urban Coup worked with the Architecture architecture team to realise our dream of living in a co-housing community that was designed with and for us. Aa was outstanding to work with. Their capacity and enthusiasm for community processes delivered 29 liveable and connected homes. I love living in my apartment and Urban Coup and I wouldn’t hesitate to work with Aa again.
Alex, Urban Coup Resident
Park Street
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, life in the treetops.
Nightingale Housing
Nightingale revolutionizes multi-residential development by establishing a freely available, cost-transparent, open-source model in which designers work directly with purchasers, for the purposes of creating environmentally, socially and financially sustainable homes.Brunswick
Nightingale Housing
, sustainable homes.
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