Studio Associate at SJB Gabrielle Suhr was the project leader for Nightingale Marrickville which has gone on to take out the Premier's Prize at the 2024 NSW Architecture Awards.
She says what makes the Nightingale model so special is that it isn't about profit.
“Taking profit out of property is really important,” she says.
“The focus was about creating communities and great places to live and I haven’t met a person who doesn’t love their nightingale apartment”.
Gabrielle says apartment design has been quite static for a number of years and she’d like to see more flexibility in this space.
“It’s been assumed we all want extra bedrooms, we all want laundries and we all want a ceiling,” she comments.
Yet, the end users of Nightingale didn’t necessarily want any of those things. Through consultation with the community SJB discovered that what they really wanted was simply services that worked.
“So anything that could be shared was shared,” Gabrielle says.
While Gabrielle would like to see design becoming more community minded, she worries that the pandemic has led people to want the exact opposite.
“I’ve noticed a particular focus on making sure you’ve got everything that you need in your house,” she says.
“In a way I feel like people are wanting bigger homes. They don’t want to be with the public anymore. They want to have theatres at home, they want to have wellness spas at home.”
“Hopefully a focus on community can reverse that and help let go of that fear so much because I definitely think to be sustainable we need to reduce our footprint. There are too many houses in Sydney that are vacant or only have one or two people living in them”.
When it comes to sustainability in construction, she says it’s “a slow process to legislate”.
“Sustainability as a checklist of requirements can be fundamentally very expensive hence why it’s such a slow moving beast most of the time”
When looking at the future of residential design Gabrielle says we need to face up to the amount of carbon we are using.
“I definitely think that is the direction for our industry to actually start counting carbon and controlling carbon in a very meaningful way. I think there will be a lot of work done in this space. We will be able to go back to the fundamentals of architecture and find that there are clever ways we can actually design to decrease the use of carbon in our projects”.
She notes that the definition of sustainability is diversifying beyond just selecting products known to be more sustainable or that are made in a sustainable way.
“I think we will actually be able to expand on sustainability to deal with projects that are financially sustainable as well as environmentally sustainable”.
She is also really interested in social sustainability and making sure that buildings are used how they were intended and therefore they are loved.
“When buildings are loved they’re used for a long time and they’re looked after; so the maintenance of buildings means that ultimately you build once which is the most sustainable outcome”.
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