Newington Apartments

Won Royal Australian Institute of Architects Premier’s Award and set a residential benchmark.

Location

Sydney

Type

Residential

Completed on

11.10.2000

Services Rendered

Design of building forms and massing
Development of facades
3D Design
Liason with external Architects

Sydney Olympic Village, Newington NSW

A very special project not just for me, but for the Australian nation as a whole; in September 1993, the President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, declared that Sydney was to be the host city for the summer Olympic Games of 2000.

Having relocated to Sydney, I landed a job in the design department of Mirvac, already Australia's top residential developer.

One immediate requirement for Mirvac was that the Olympics, and the subsequent Paralympics, would require a world-class athletes’ village.

Mirvac seized the opportunity and recognised the project as a showcase to deliver the world’s best practice planning, design and construction and set a new benchmark for environmentally sustainable development. A major challenge was that after the Games the village would become a new suburb of Sydney, with all the associated long-term planning and infrastructure needs.

in The result was Newington.

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To date it has received an unprecedented 36 major building, architectural and design awards and has become a model for urban developments worldwide. In 2002 it won the prestigious Royal Australian Institute of Architects Premier’s Award.

Houses and apartments at Newington were designed in conjunction with HPA (Mirvac) by a team of Sydney’s best housing architects. They were designed initially to function as part of the Olympic Village, and then later as part of an integrated suburban community. The Newington apartments have received national acclaim for their design.

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RAIA JURY VERDICT TEXT [Olympic Village Units, Sydney, Australia Gold medal award 2000].

This is given to the Apartments at Newington to acknowledge their outstanding urban qualities and the fact that multiple-housing - with its larger scale and specialised planning, design and construction demands - is a major growth area for architectural practice Australia-wide, in both temperate and tropical zones.

The Apartments have been regarded as making a major contribution not only at Homebush - where they provide a coherent built edge between the Olympic Village and Millennium Park - but also to current standards of excellence in Australian architecture.

The buildings are generally three-story walk-up units above an in-ground car park with occasional two-story maisonettes punctuating the roof line. A cohesive village edge is achieved by the use of restricted materials and colour palettes, and the linearity of the development has been cleverly reduced by breaking the buildings into varying size blocks of four to ten apartments per level. Their simple flat roof forms rely on massing for scale and applied functional elements for adornment.

Important aspects of the whole concept are the methodical breakdown of building mass to residential scale, the maintenance of visual and acoustic privacy, solar access in winter and shaded or restricted solar penetration in summer. The apartments set a benchmark for multiple housing developments, responding carefully to urban values and achieving marked urbanity as a consequence.

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