Yun Fu

Yun Fu is an architect and partner of Semester Studio, a design and research office for buildings, objects, and neighborhoods. Based in New Zealand and Hong Kong and working internationally, the studio received the 2020 Rome Prize in Architecture at the British School, the Australian Home of Tomorrow Competition First Prize, and was one of five international finalists for the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2021 Summer Pavillion Commission in Melbourne. Yun had trained with Glenn Murcutt in Sydney, ZAO/standardarchitecture in Beijing, and Foster+Partners in London prior to establishing the studio with partners Manus Leung and Wenting Guo.

Yun joined the faculty at Harvard’s Design School in 2018, where he co-authored and coordinate the first-year Master of Architecture in Urban Design core studio; and teaches lecture courses on Housing, Cities, and Urban Design theory. Yun’s scholarly work focuses on the mechanisms of design thinking, post-disaster reconstructions, and architecture in the Asia Pacific. Recent and upcoming publications include Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground (Birkhäuser, 2023), The Global Villager (Harvard Design Magazine, 2022), Southeast Asian Modern: From Roots to Contemporary Turns (Birkhäuser, 2022), and Korean Modern: The Matter of Identity (Birkhäuser, 2021).

Yun held the 2017 Sinclair Kennedy Travelling Fellowship for his work on the Structural Basis of Contemporary Architecture in the Asia Pacific, and was a Confucius Scholar at Peking University in 2016, working on the opportunities and limits of reconstruction in the Sinosphere. He received a doctoral degree from Harvard University in 2020, serving as class marshal, and had 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.