Research – NH Architecture

Research

NH Architecture has established a number of in-house research groups: Sustainability, Technology, Urban Design, Knowledge and Education, Living and Materials and Fabrication, which provide focus to ongoing professional development and knowledge for our staff.

This initiative cross-pollinates knowledge from disparate project teams throughout the office, ensuring lessons learnt at the coalface are widely communicated. This enables masterplanners, designers, documenters, interior designers and graphic designers to all benefit from each other’s expertise.

Extensive mapping and analysis on Melbourne’s laneway and arcade network, has resulted in NH producing a catalogue of empirical data including widths, configurations, furniture, material, shopfronts and lighting, to inform our designers of actual conditions. This is an ever-evolving reference set for all urban design typologies.

NH has developed an expansive catalogue of urban typologies generated from first principles research. We have spent the last decade generating an empirically researched portfolio of Melbourne’s inner-city and suburban laneways, public buildings, urban spaces, town centres and high streets. We have learnt our urban design lessons about the city from the city.

Throughout this research and innovation process, our team utilises a full range of design tools and techniques, to investigate and discuss options and alternatives. As well as regular reports, digital 3D and graphic presentations, we use NH Architecture’s in-house model-making workshop to develop alternative scenarios for built form and public space. This allows all key decision makers to direct the project, founded on a proactive evidenced-based process of investigation.

Our ongoing research seeks to answer vital contemporary questions within both a local and global context, through the engagement with design competitions as well as academic debate. As winner of the 2018 Land Art Generator Initiative competition, NH’s practice research group proposed a large-scale public arts and urban design initiative that produces clean energy. The proposal combined solar, wind, plant fuel-cell energy harvesting, and battery storage into the landscape of the St. Kilda foreshore.