MSD students win big at international design competition
Three teams of Melbourne School of Design students have been awarded the 1st, 2nd and equal 3rd prizes for their footbridge design entries to an international student design competition run by the Lightweight Structures Association of Australasia (LSAA).
Participants were invited to develop a conceptual design proposal that embodies the principles of lightweight structures, with a strong emphasis on sustainability, structural performance, and responses to contemporary social and climate challenges.
Entrants were encouraged to explore the relationship between structure, form, and architectural expression, and to investigate how structure itself can become architecture.
The design brief called for projects to be located within an urban or landscape setting in Australia, with participants selecting an appropriate context where a pedestrian bridge is required to connect two points across an urban street, water body, landscape feature, or public space.
Each of the winning student teams from MSD had undertaken the Computational Design and Optimisation subject as part of their Master of Architecture, which gave them expertise in the advanced computational design tools crucial to addressing the project brief in this competition.
Subject coordinator Associate Professor Alberto Pugnale commended the students’ success, describing the wins as “an outstanding collective result that reflects the students’ creativity, technical rigour and commitment to computational design, structural design and lightweight construction”.
1st Place: Bridge at Dights Falls
Team Members: Jack Trentepohl and Drew Muscat, The University of Melbourne
2nd Place: Lakeview Passage
Team Members: Tom Maynard and Paras Notaras, The University of Melbourne
3rd Place: Oar Trace
Team Members: Lan Lyu and Yang Hu, The University of Melbourne
(Tied for third place with this project from RMIT) 
The jurors for the 2026 student competition were:
- Prof Philip F. Yuan, Dean, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University
- Mr Greg Gong, Director, Denton Corker Marshall
- Mr John McNeil, Bridge Design Expert, Modus Forma
The competition drew inspiration from architect-engineers such as Santiago Calatrava, Frei Otto, Pier Luigi Nervi, Félix Candela, and Heinz Isler, whose work demonstrates how structural systems can generate form, space, and architectural identity.
The LSAA is a Not-for-profit, autonomous, interdisciplinary group of interested parties involved in the field of lightweight architectural structures, founded in 1981, and operating primarily in Australia and New Zealand to promote the proper application of lightweight structures, their design, fabrication, construction and materials.
You can view all the 2026 entries here.