Ming Hin Chung Announced as Winner of The Walls Around Us Student Competition

Ming Hin Chung has been named winner of The Walls Around Us Student Competition, presented by the Robin Boyd Foundation and the Boyd Circle with support from Brickworks Building Products.

A recent graduate of the Melbourne School of Design, Ming Hin will travel to the Biennale Architettura Vernissage in Venice in 2025 – an international opportunity awarded for a compelling design response that reimagines Robin Boyd’s Walsh Street house through a post-human, sustainable lens.

His proposal, Growing House, cleverly inverts Boyd’s original concept by placing the house within a garden and rethinking the brick walls as permeable screens. This spatial approach is reinforced through a series of details that show a clarity of intention down to the assembly of individual elements. The jury described the project as a worthy winner, deploying a sequence of actions – disassembly, adaptation and reuse – to replay Boyd’s house according to a contemporary script.

The jury – Eve Castle (QLD), National Business Development Manager at Brickworks Building Products; Dr Christine Phillips (VIC), Senior Lecturer in Architecture & Urban Design at RMIT University; and Gerard Reinmuth (NSW), Director of TERROIR and Professor of Practice at UTS – agreed the project offered a clever, multi-faceted response to the brief, written by local sustainability advocate and Kennedy Nolan project architect, Hilary Duff.

The jury also allocated one high commendation and two commendations.

The Link-House proposal designed by Andy Wilson, from the Melbourne School of Design, was awarded a high commendation for its clarity and ‘minimal works’ approach. RMIT University student Connor Harris’ Genealogical Timeliness in the Anthropocene was awarded a commendation for – a conceptually strong scheme that used Boyd’s house as a frame for new overlays, combining a superimposition of Tange’s house with an accretion of scavenged materials. The jury also commended Melbourne School of Design student Je Yen Tan’s 12 Rooms for Walsh Street – which offered a flexible plan and a deep engagement with Boyd’s original vision.

Shortlisted Entries

• Agnes Leonardi
• Alice Stewart
• Andy Wilson
• Charlie Eastwood
• Connor Harris
• Felix Tie
• Je Yen Tan
• Ming Hin Chung
• Yu Qin Tan

An exhibition of shortlisted entries will be on display until 18 March

• 9 am – 5 pm daily (closed weekends and public holidays)
• Brickworks Design Studio, 367 Collins Street, Melbourne VIC 3000

Presented by the Robin Boyd Foundation and the Boyd Circle The Walls Around Us Student Competition is generously sponsored by Brickworks Building Products.