Winner revealed for Walls Around Us Student Competition

The winner for the Robin Boyd Foundation's Walls Around Us Student Competition has been revealed from a shortlist of nine individuals. Ming Hin Chung, who graduated from the Melbourne School of Design with a Bachelor of Design (Architecture) in 2024, has been named recipient of the prize and will travel to Venice for the Biennale Architettura Vernissage in May this year.

The jury - comprising national business development manager at Brickworks Eve Castle, senior lecturer in architecture and urban design at RMIT University Christine Phillips, and director of Terroir and professor of practice at the UTS School of Architecture Gerard Reinmuth - agreed that Hin Chung's proposal was a clever, multifaceted response to the brief.

Penned by Hilary Duff, project architect at Kennedy Nolan, the competition brief invited students to imagine a new way of living on the Boyd House II/Walsh Street site by thinking critically about material use through minimising quantities, being tactical in composition, and extending the life of both structures and materials.

The jury commented that Hin Chung's winning scheme, titled Growing House, "cleverly proposes an inversion of Boyd's original design by placing the house inside a garden and rethinking the brick walls as permeable screens. This spatial sophistication is reinforced in a series of details that show a clarity of intention right down to the assembly of individual elements."

One high commendation and two commendations were awarded by the jury. Also from the Melbourne School of Design, Andy Wilson's proposal, titled Link-House, received a high commendation due to the clarity of its "singular intervention [that] forges a meaningful link between past and future design approaches, physically uniting the two structures while embracing Robin Boyd's tight-fit spatial approach."

Genealogical Timeliness in the Anthropocene by RMIT University student Connor Harris, and 12 Rooms for Walsh Street by Melbourne School of Design student Je Yen Tan both received commendations.