9/19/2023 0 Comments Parklife homes![]() ![]() Both impulses are evident in the design, which replicates the tongue-in-cheek playfulness that has become a hallmark of the practice, while focusing limited resources on maximizing collective amenity. According to director Mark Austin, the key lesson could be distilled to a simple mantra: “efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.” Principal Andrew Maynard describes a broader desire to create a “village inside a village” at Parklife. Austin Maynard Architects was able to learn from its Terrace House (2022), which began as a contemporaneous Nightingale project. The last parcel allocated, Parklife became the most conventionally appealing, with a sheer northerly aspect to Bulleke-bek Park and separation from the train line. Wowowa’s loss was Evergreen’s (Clare Cousins Architects) and Parklife’s (Austin Maynard Architects) gain. In 2019, in what was a first for the council, it purchased the seventh Village site and adjacent properties to create a new public park.īulleke-bek Park borders Evergreen (right) and Austin Maynard Architects’ Parklife, which has a civic-minded passage that connects the park with the Village’s Duckett Street hub. An additional building, by Wowowa Architecture, was a casualty of the City of Merri-bek’s late-dawning realization that unrelenting boundary-to-boundary development in the area was depriving the burgeoning resident community of access to vital open space. Acquired in 2017 as a cluster of low-slung warehouses in the same former light-industrial pocket of Brunswick as Nightingale 1 (Breathe, 2017), 4 the site is now home to six buildings designed and developed by six different architects, spread across two blocks hugging the Upfield train line and shared (bike/pedestrian) path. This sentiment comes to mind when appraising Nightingale Village – simultaneously the final, defining statement of Nightingale’s original architect-as-developer incarnation, and the first expression of its environmental and community-led ethos to project beyond the individual building. Portman himself framed his hybrid career as an enlarging of architectural agency, elevating the importance of design within the development equation and enabling him to “design the city … not just the individual buildings.” 2,3 For every Solidspace (London) or architect-led Baugruppen (Berlin) capitalizing on the freedom to experiment outside prevailing real-estate-market logics, there are countless speculative, small-scale homebuilders looking to simply capitalize, through nondescript exercises in entrepreneurial city-making. In Portman’s megastructural projects, “the vision of the architect realised without opposition, without influence, without inhibition.” 1 The architect-as-developer model has a long, chequered history. Writing 25 years ago about John Portman in an essay on the fragmented “disurbanism” of Atlanta, Rem Koolhaas argued that Portman’s synthesis of the roles of architect and developer – “a self-administered Faustian bargain” – had eliminated necessary creative tension. ![]()
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