Landscape Architecture Australia
Expanding the residential agenda
Four Melbourne practitioners discuss their respective residential design approaches and how they are engaging with the challenges and complexities of a rapidly changing city.
Four practitioners discuss their residential design approaches and how these are responding to the challenges of a rapidly changing city. Interview by Jen Lynch.
What role do residential landscapes play in the context of the climate emergency, population growth and the housing affordability crisis? And how are landscape architects pushing boundaries in their design approaches, for both traditional and emerging residential typologies?
As Melbourne’s population booms, the city’s residential landscape continues to expand and transform through processes of infill and sprawl. Melbourne has become the fourth least affordable housing market globally – behind Sydney at third – and, in the context of the climate crisis, resourceintensive landscape conventions such as lawns and green walls come into question.
How is our profession responding to these changing contexts? Here, four Melbourne designers explore new design approaches for the city’s varied residential landscapes: private gardens, landscapes for social housing communities, multi-residential infill landscapes and landscape-driven urban precincts.
Jen Lynch — Could you give an overview of a project you’ve been working on recently?
Anthony Sharples — We’re currently working on a project in Brunswick East, which is a classic residential project. The client wanted a landscape that felt wild and almost like a forest. The whole idea with the project is that there are no edges
– it questions the notion of edges between different elements. The design, for instance, involves an indigenous lawn, which doesn’t have an edge; we’re allowing the client to dictate the shape of that lawn. We’ve also chosen not to have any hard surfaces – we’re using gravel as a mulch and strategic concrete sleepers, which jut through the garden and take you on a journey. All of these elements blend together.
Alistair Kirkpatrick — All the species we’ve selected for the garden, once established, are resilient and can cope with Melbourne’s rainfall, and a lot of the species are non-hybridized, meaning that they can produce viable seed. These species allow the garden to find its own rhythm, self-sow, and move about, so that, even with minimal maintenance, it still looks designed. This touches on something that separates residential gardens from public projects – maintenance is absolutely key to how a garden evolves. The garden, by very definition, is far more intimate and has a direct dialogue with the clients.
JL — Will you leave the client with any sort of documentation that provides advice around that maintenance process?
AS — We generally go back to each project at least once a year, to have a look at how everything’s growing. For our clients who aren’t gardeners, we usually link them with a gardener. It really depends on the individual and also what involvement that client wanted to start with, because that really dictates what we design for people.
KL — What does research look like for your practice?
AK — Because we are so plant-focused, the body of our research is vegetative. Because we’ve done so many different residential projects in so many different areas, we’ve
discovered which plants are going to work in every situation. We’re also constantly testing new species.
AS — A lot of our learning comes from going back to projects, when we seehow things have grown. That’s how we build knowledge for the next project; it becomes our design suite. We apply the knowledge we gain through our residential projects to public projects as well.
AK — We also undertake research through design studios we co-teach, which are all about bottom-up design, thinking about what the landscape is telling you about the kinds of ecologies and micro-climates and conditions that are happening on the site. We approach designing clients’ gardens in the same way – we always take into account aspect and shadowing from other properties, we always investigate the geology and the soil, and our gardens are informed by the biological and geological conditions of the site.
JL — What do you see as key challenges and future opportunities for landscape architects working on residential projects?
AK — If landscape architects are goin to have a viable future in residential garden design, there needs to be a focus within the academies on teaching about not only plants but systems knowledge. Given the fact that that body of knowledge has been consistently devalued and degraded within the academies, overseas and in Australia, you’re going to end up with a generation of landscape architects that don’t know anything about soils or plants or hydrology. If they go into gardening and garden design, they won’t have the requisite skills.
AS — I would absolutely echo that. If you were trying to go into residential garden design without plant knowledge, you couldn’t do it, because a majority of the knowledge [required] there is on plants – at least 70 percent.
AK — Especially with a changing climate, systems knowledge, botanical knowledge and environmental ecological knowledge are going to be critical to keeping our discipline relevant and viable.
JL — Could you provide an overview of the Nightingale Village project?
Mark Jacques — The project involves six individual sites in Brunswick, which are being developed as a precinct by Nightingale Housing. The Nightingale development model takes developers out of the equation by removing the profit motive from a project and delivering housing at cost. Nightingale is the client, but the projects’ architects are the proponents of each site, acting on behalf of a community who have already signed up to their building. So, even though it’s one client, the project still has six autonomous voices.
JL — How did you become involved in the project?
MJ — The office has a longstanding relationship with Jeremy McLeod, director of Breathe Architecture and the founder of Nightingale Housing. I worked with others on Nightingale 1 and Openwork has been involved with Nightingale 3, Nightingale 4 and now Nightingale Ballarat, collaborating with AKAS. As for Nightingale Village, Jeremy started talking about the purchase of a cluster of sites and the potential of scaling-up Nightingale’s preoccupation with shared infrastructure to see if it worked as a precinct. I obviously expressed an interest and found myself walking the site with the team and all six of the architects one day. We started working on the project from then.
JL — So, a brief was never issued, it was something that emerged out of an existing relationship with the client and then walking the site with the consultant team?
MJ — Yes, it emerged from walking the site. The six sites aren’t all together – three are along Duckett Street, two more are across
the road, and one is an outlier. When we were walking around, it became clear that while Duckett Street has a defined frontage, the built fabric at its rear boundaries was very flimsy – there are weak spots that could easily be broken through to make new connections. We made a drawing showing how, and that was the master plan around which the project is formed. It became clear that a series of potential new streets existed between boundaries and that each of the buildings could have two addresses – a street frontage and a residential mews – and that those two different addresses could have totally different characters and should be emphatically public.
JL — What opportunities open up when the model moves from building scale to precinct scale?
MJ — Heaps. One is the urban structure, the civic armature that holds the whole thing together, which simply isn’t available as a single-allotment development.
Then, when you look at the buildings themselves and the way the ground plane is configured, there are some fantastic things happening that could only be done in this kind of scale.
Here, unlike most Nightingale projects, there is some basement car parking, for a community car share. To access that car park, there’s only one crossover in the whole project, into a basement that is shared between four buildings. The business-as-usual model would have multiple car parks, crossovers and booster cabinets, which would chew up the ground plane. Instead, a number of buildings share the infrastructure and liberate the ground plane for everybody else.
The consequence is that Duckett Street can now be closed to traffic and becomes a park that has no obligation to have any vehicles. An outcome like the pocket park could have been negotiated in another way, but that this project has been able to do it largely as an unsolicited idea has been great.
JL — What opportunities have been opened up at a finer grain?
MJ — At a finer grain, the consequence of those two moves – the urban structure with the two types of streets and the reduction of crossovers and services through sharing – frees up the ground to do different things. The team has freedom to design what’s missing in almost all new multi-res frontages – full allotment width commercial and residential activation. With that much space, there’s room to experiment with the kindness of streetscape interfaces.
JL — How do you see the landscape scope operating in the next iteration of this type of project?
MJ — I’d see our involvement in this kind of project as operating in two ways. The first is the stuff that happens at project formation, where we’re designing the project from the outside in and setting up a spatial armature that encourages buildings to behave in a particular way – that’s a landscape-led urban design approach.
The second way that we operate probably has a direct relationship to the architecture, where we’re attempting to de-scale, dematerialize and breach the edges of the building.
Nightingale Village makes two things clear: the job of landscape in the design of the precinct is to erode the autonomy of the allotment boundary, and the job of landscape in the design of the multi-residential projects is to erode the autonomy of the private territorial boundary. It’s one activity at two scales; making the ownership of territory ambiguous is a way of encouraging shared ownership, exchange and the dialogue that comes from negotiation and agreement.
JL — Could you give an overview of a project you’ve been working on recently?
Simone Bliss — We have recently completed Nightingale 2 in Fairfield. We were engaged by Hip V. Hype, who were partnering with Six Degrees Architects to produce the third Nightingale project. Six Degrees were principal consultant and their brief to us was to treat the building as if it were the ruins of Babylon – from a character perspective, they wanted to celebrate the imperfect and have gardens creeping up all over the building and, with time, ideally, a large portion of it covered in creepers, so you won’t actually see the precast concrete.
JL — Why were you interested in the project?
SB — An interest in the Nightingale model’s social and environment intent, and also as an opportunity to showcase that the Australian palette of plants should be used in developments. In renders, we tend to see entire facades coated in subtropical plants, which sets expectations that can’t be met.
We treated Nightingale as a mountainous landscape, with the idea that, the further up the building, the drier and windier it is, and therefore the plants on the rooftop are very different to [those on] the ground floor. That meant that we were looking at dry sclerophyll planting, lots of hardy wattle species – plants that haven’t normally been used in that sort of environment.
The rooftop, for example, has clay wattle, leafless rock wattle, Eucalyptus pulverulenta and other hardy, native species. The southern side of the building has prostrate wattle species that will creep over and create a yellow facade, and also an ornamental gum vine. At the arrival to the foyer, there are a number of rainforest species. And we’ve got a staghorn fern and epiphyte wall, which is a continuous element that climbs up the facade from the ground floor to level four. It was something we had to take a big risk on, as lots of people told us that we couldn’t do it. We talked to a lot of nurseries and people in the industry and thought, let’s try this and see if it works. Because, if it does, it will be a precedent for green walls moving forward – rather than planting them with something that is meant to be providing a thermal mass but that is potentially creating a need for more light, water and maintenance. Overall, we used a native palette to showcase unusual plants, knowing that there’d be lots of people touring that building.
JL — It’s a prototype that sets a new standard or reference point.
SB — Yes, and that, in turn, aids the nursery industry in growing plants that are not widely sought after, following up on the movement that Paul Thompson and many others have created, of trying to introduce more common use of Australian plant species that are not typically used.
JL — Were there any challenges with the project?
SB —Because it was a building novation project, the landscape was left till last, not only in terms of the construction but also the thinking. Typically, when you get to the end of a project and someone says, “We can’t get any of those plants,” you have to substitute them with something else. But we took a pretty hard stance and said, “No, we’re not subbing them, wait for them to grow and put them in later.” And, thankfully, they did – the project has been open for eight months and the large species of the wattles have just gone in. It shifts the expectation for an instant landscape, which is driven by the building novation process, and says, “This is something that’s going to be here for a really long time. What’s six months?”
JL — Have you gotten any feedback yet from the residents?
SB — No formal feedback, but lots of compliments on the planting types and how the landscape feels. There’s a sort of Nightingale planting committee, as one of the social groups within the apartment building, and I talk to them quite regularly about what sort of plants to use and why, so that we can keep that relationship moving forward. I like the idea of them knowing where the intent came from and being able to ask me questions as needed.
JL — I’ve heard you speak about a few of your projects – the Launch Housing project, the Coburg Townhouses and a project for Aboriginal Housing Victoria. Could you give an overview of these?
Sophie Dyring — The Launch Housing project is a social housing project in Footscray that provides housing and services to people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Out of the nine sites, two are completed and seven are under construction still.
The Coburg Townhouses are a project by Women’s Property Initiatives. The project involves seven townhouses and was completed in 2016. There have been women and women with kids living there for the past four-and-a-half years.
For Aboriginal Housing Victoria, we’re doing four projects – all infill housing in the south-east of Melbourne.
JL — The clients for the three projects are housing not-for-profits. How did you become involved?
SD — I began my practice over a decade ago
with Graham Gunn. We did a lot of private residential projects and I wanted to open that up to social housing work. It was a long, hard slog of opening up my network and meeting people until I got a foot in the door with one of them. We’ve managed to get a few of them now.
JL — Across the three projects, how were the landscape briefs presented to you? Did you think about the landscape scope on different terms?
SD — Aboriginal Housing Victoria had the most developed brief, because they have seven design principles that they’ve developed through consultation with their tenants – for instance, tying internal and external spaces together so that families can expand and contract. That connection of internal and external spaces is something we generally do when we work anyway, but, in this project, we’ve extended that even beyond the private space into the communal landscape – in one of the projects, there’s a central car park of three cars, one for each unit.
But that’s also been considered as a place for the community to gather, because if cars were parked on the street, they’d have a much larger space. The landscape briefs for the Launch Housing and Coburg
Townhouses projects were minimal –lowmaintenance, drought-tolerant.
JL — How does research play out in your practice? I know you collaborate frequently with Sam Donnelly and that you’ve recently been awarded funding for post-occupancy research.
SD — I’ve always been keen to do postoccupancy research, because, at the start of these projects, it’s impossible to get the brief directly from people that are going to live there – community housing organizations can’t bring future tenants on board when they’re briefing for a new project because they don’t know who’s going to live there. Because all briefings come from an organization, I’ve felt one step removed from who’s going to live there in the end. I’ve wanted to close that divide.
Sam Donnelly is a PhD fellow at Monash [University] and our collaboration has continued since [we were] introduced. Last year, we put together a symposium for Melbourne Design Week: Women, Design and Housing. We were recently awarded a grant by the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, which supports research into housing and homelessness.
We’re using the grant to investigate how these issues relate specifically to women. We’re hoping we can use female community housing residents’ feedback to make the next projects more fit for purpose and address things that aren’t working.
JL — Could you describe the role of the landscape in any of your projects, on an individual level or on a community level?
SD — In feedback from organizations and from tenants, there’s been quite a bit on landscape. On the Launch Housing project, Deb (one of the residents in the first site that was finished and occupied) said the space that makes her feel like she has a home for the first time in 35 years is the garden above the building accommodation. The garden is her most important space in her little house.
At the Coburg Townhouses, we designed a productive landscape that was meant to bring the on-site community together. It has brought the community together but in a totally different way. Several residents came together to redesign the space, so it has achieved the objective we had but not through the means that we thought.