More than a dozen architectural firms from across Australia and overseas will compete to design homes for five Sydney sites earmarked by the New South Wales government to help ease the state’s housing crisis.
The 15 finalists in the government’s model book design competition were announced on Monday, selected from portfolios and expressions of interest from more than 200 entries.
While multi-family housing models have been used sporadically since colonial times, this is the first time the NSW government, rather than a private company, has pioneered them. The idea behind a multi-family housing model is to provide a fast track to construction by pre-approving selected plans, cutting out red tape and lengthy planning applications.
After submitting site-specific projects in October, five winners will be selected to build their low- and mid-rise projects across the five metropolitan sites, only one of which has been unveiled to date: Sydney Olympic Park. Two sites have been earmarked for new terraced housing and three sites for low- and mid-rise apartments.
The projects will be delivered in partnership with the government’s social housing arm, Housing NSW, its affordable housing arm, Landcom, and the Sydney Olympic Park Authority.
Although these five projects will not benefit from a fast-track approval process, it is expected that the winning projects will be made public, with the benefits of the fast-track process associated with them, at some point next year.
According to data provided by the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, average assessment times for local DAs in NSW increased from 83 days in 2021-22 to 106 days in 2022-23. The 10 councils with the longest average assessment times in 2022-23 took between 172 and 281 days.
Paulo Macchia, acting executive director of Government Architect NSW, said the criteria of “viability, constructability, replicability, cost-effectiveness and sustainability” were all considered by the jury.
“We need them to be cost-sensitive, but that doesn’t mean they’re all going to be as affordable as a capital A, as they would be if they were run by a community housing provider,” he said.
“But we want them to be somewhat affordable, reasonable in terms of the costs they entail.”
The plans must also be what Macchia describes as “tenure blind.”
“That means when you look at housing, whether it’s an apartment building or a terraced house, it has to be suitable for all needs and not have any stigma attached to it,” he said.
“You won’t be able to tell if it’s a market, an affordable area or a social area because it’s designed to fit in with the character of our streets.”
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The call for entries for the notebook competition attracted architectural practices from around the world. Three international practices – one from London, one from New Zealand and a multinational with operations in Germany, Italy, India and Sydney – are among the finalists. The other 12 are based in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia.
Six other student teams from the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney and Western Sydney University were also named as finalists, although their designs were not eligible to compete for a place among the five chosen to build their final designs.
A statement from NSW Minister for Planning and Public Spaces Paul Scully said student teams had been invited to take part “to ensure young people contribute to the future of their city”.
The winning entries, judged by a five-person competition jury chaired by NSW Government Architect Abbie Galvin, will be announced in November.
The shortlisted finalists in the professional category are:
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