Ann Lau

Ann, a principal at Hayball with 30+ years of international experience, shapes design culture nationwide. An interdisciplinary practitioner, she works on diverse projects like housing, public, mixed-use, urban design, and learning architecture. She collaborates with development, institutional, and government clients, using research-driven strategies. Her ethos emphasizes intergenerational, socially responsive, community-led, climate-sensitive, and place-based designs.

She believes design education, mentorship, academic partnerships, and critique enrich practice, and teaching boosts empathy, listening, communication, and collaboration, key for impactful projects with societal legacies. An advocate for professional knowledge, she has taught locally and internationally and now advises at RMIT and Swinburne Universities.

She believes that built environment professionals must, in practice, advocate for ethical civil societies that support social and gender diversity, environmental justice, housing, health, and education as rights for all

Over the years, she has served on Institute of Architects Awards juries and is a member of the Melbourne Design Review Panel and the Urban Design Advisory Panel of the Suburban Rail Loop Authority, Victorian State Government.