Extract

Reducing the environmental impacts of building whilst improving urban liveability has become a key challenge for the Australian multi-residential sector, as recent projects have been criticised for their poor environmental performance and internal amenity. Alternative models for multi-residential development – such as the Nightingale Model – are a recent response to this challenge. Employing an ‘architecture of reductionism’, the Nightingale Model seeks to deliver superior environmental and occupant outcomes. However, given the infancy of the model, an assessment of its performance is yet to be conducted. Assessments of building performance are critical to developing new and emerging approaches, yet existing evaluation methodologies are plagued by limitations. The most notable limitation is the lack of holistic frameworks that concurrently consider life-cycle ecological impacts and occupant wellbeing. The absence of such frameworks limits the ability to identify interrelationships between areas of performance and may possibly promote problem shifting. To develop an approach that can address this key limitation – and subsequently assess innovative housing models targeting a holistic approach to building performance – the paper concludes with a series of recommendations for approaching the creation of an integrated framework of assessment, which will quantify impacts to ecological and human systems in parallel.

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