Ochre-tinted precast concrete forms Nightingale housing by Kennedy Nolan

[Celerity]

https://www.dezeen.com/2023/09/22/ochre-precast-concrete-nightingale-housing-kennedy-nolan-australia/







Australian studio Kennedy Nolan has completed Leftfield, an affordable housing block with a "playful" form of pigmented precast concrete panels in the Brunswick neighbourhood of Melbourne. Part of the Nightingale Village development, the block by Kennedy Nolan is an example of a typology created under the Nightingale development model, which aims to design residential projects that are "environmentally, socially and financially sustainable". The entire village has been longlisted in the Housing project category of the Dezeen Awards.









Acting as a developer for the project, Kennedy Nolan aimed to imbue its building of 28 homes with "personality" to give it a welcoming presence in the urban block in which it sits. "Our methodology always looks to do more with less," said studio founder Patrick Kennedy. "This meant identifying fundamental parts of the building and thinking about ways to manipulate or deploy them to make our Nightingale feel domestic, warm, textural and particular."









Located in an urban block adjacent to a railway line and surrounded by industrial warehouses to the south, single family homes to the west, and larger apartment and office blocks to the north and east, the project is prominently positioned and is visible across Brunswick. Large-scale geometric compositions of oculi on the building's western facade create a generous "urban-scale gesture" to the surrounding neighbourhood, according to the studio.









The warm tint of the ochre precast concrete panels used on the building's facades glows in the afternoon sun, while the inlaid chevron pattern provides texture and contributes to its pictorial imagery. "We were motivated to make the building sober, handsome and warm - qualities which are domestic or which can instil domestic pride," explained Kennedy.

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[TygrBright]

1. That's a lovely use of concrete. But many of the interiors look acoustically problematic. n/t