Yun Fu

Background

About Yun Fu

Yun Fu is an architect, urban designer, and partner of Semester Studio - based in New Zealand and Hong Kong and operating internationally, the studio works with pioneering clients to rethink more sustainable everyday life in the Asia Pacific. Semester's recent work on the function of slowness in cities, the re-fitting of pervasive modernist neighborhoods for contemporary life, and the prototyping of material circularity in timber construction received the British School's Rome Prize, the Australian Home of Tomorrow Competition First Prize, and China International Furniture Fair's Prizes for Best Design and Sustainability. Yun worked with Glenn Murcutt in Sydney, Foster+Partners in London and ZAO/standardarchitecture in Beijing before establishing Semester Studio with partners Manus Leung and Wenting Guo. At Harvard, Yun co-authored and coordinate the core Master of Architecture in Urban Design studio and teach courses on housing, cities, and building cultures in the Asia Pacific. He's a coordinator of the undergraduate-facing Design Discovery Program and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Yun's scholarly work focuses on the design process, looking at different approaches to recurring classes of design problems across historical and cultural contexts, and examining their cognitive basis, interactions, evolution, and application in practice. Yun is the author of several books including Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground: On Architecture in Seismic Regions (Birkhäuser, 2023), Southeast Asian Modern: From Roots to Contemporary Turns (Birkhäuser, 2022), and Korean Modern: The Matter of Identity (Birkhäuser, 2021). Yun’s held the Sinclair Kennedy Travelling Fellowship for his work on the Structural Basis of Contemporary Architecture in the Asia Pacific, a Graham Foundation grant for a field-expanding publication re-framing risk and resilience as a critical design problem, and was a Confucius Scholar at Peking University, working on the opportunities and limits of post-disaster reconstruction in the Sinosphere. He received a doctoral degree from Harvard University, serving as class marshal, and previously received a MArch I AP with Distinction from Harvard GSD with the AIA Henry Adams Medal, and a BAs from UNSW Sydney with the AIA Undergraduate Design Medal, the Dean's Award, and the Eric Daniels Prize in Residential Design. He was a New Zealand National Scholar in Mathematics with Calculus and Fine Arts in Painting.