Yun Fu

Yun Fu is a partner at SEMESTER, a design and research studio, and a faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Yun’s work explores different forms of design intelligence and their applications to persistent classes of design problems, such as ways of shaping the city and ideas of sustainability. His first sole-authored book, Thinking and Building On Shaky Ground (Birkhäuser, 2023), recipient of the 2024 DAM Architecture Book Prize and a 2023 Graham Foundation Grant, examines the familiar problem of building in seismic regions and addresses the broader challenges of risk and resilience. His next two books, Different Forevers: Competing Ideas of Sustainability in Design and The Designer’s Dilemma: Human and Non-Human Design Intelligence and Their Applications, will examine distinct approaches to persistent classes of design problems, tracing each from their philosophical and historical basis to their technical, design, and urban architectural outcomes. Two prior books, Southeast Asian Modern: From Roots to Contemporary Turns (2022) and Korean Modern: The Matter of Identity (2021), delve into the Asia Pacific and Oceanic region’s encounter with modernizing influences and its subsequently unfolding into the under-explored diversity of modernity and modern architecture and urbanism.

Yun joined the Harvard Design School’s faculty in 2018 to co-author and teach in Elements of Urban Design, the Master of Architecture in Urban Design’s advanced core studio – the fourth major iteration since the program’s establishment in the 1960s. He became a full-time faculty in 2020, offering survey courses on housing and cities, and advanced seminars on design thinking and urban design theory. Since 2022, he has extended the core curriculum by co-developing a new design-centric history and theory course surveying urban design contexts and operations. Since 2024, he began leading interdisciplinary option studios engaging real-world urban architectural challenges in the Asia Pacific. The most recent, Recasting the Good Life at Mid-Density, looked at evolving ideas of the good life as it pertains to suburban housing densification in New Zealand. Situated amidst a fast-moving political transition, students produced public-facing illustrated think-pieces to better inform a critical public debate, appearing in the NZ Listener, the widest circulating current affairs magazine, and presented at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. Yun is also a coordinator of the undergraduate-facing Design Discovery program and a faculty affiliate of the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Yun is a co-founder of SEMESTER, a design and research studio working across scales from everyday objects to buildings and cities. Co-led with Manus Leung and Wenting Guo, the studio draws on expertise in architecture, industrial design, interaction design, and urban design to work within and beyond traditional design practice, adapting to the evolving nature of contemporary challenges and opportunities. The studio has realized a diverse and acclaimed body of work, balancing big-picture thinking with strategic application to deliver more playful and sustainable ways of living. SEMESTER’s Temporary Storage Garden, a pop-up public space, received the 2024 Dezeen Design Award for Best Exhibition (global). Prior honors include Best Design at the 2024 and 2023 China International Furniture Fairs, one of five international finalists for the 2021 Summer Architectural Commission at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and winner of the 2016 Australian Home of Tomorrow Prize. Prior to establishing SEMESTER, Yun worked with Foster+Partners in London and ZAO/standardarchitecture in Beijing.

Originally from Taiwan and New Zealand, and trained in Sydney, London, and Boston, Yun has held the Rome Prize Fellowship at the British School, studying the architecture of slowness, the Sinclair Kennedy Travelling Fellowship, examining the structural basis of architecture in the Pacific Rim, and served as the Confucius Visiting Scholar at Peking University, looking at the opportunities and limits of post-disaster reconstruction in the Sinosphere. He received a doctoral degree from Harvard University in 2020, serving as class marshal, and had previously received a Master of Architecture I (Advanced Placement) with Distinction from Harvard GSD with the AIA Henry Adams Medal, and a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from UNSW Sydney with the AIA Undergraduate Design Medal, the Dean’s Award, and the Eric Daniels Prize in Residential Design.