Different Design Intelligences and Their Applications
Name of Event/Lecture
Different Design Intelligences and Their Applications
Name of Speaker
Fu Yun
Location
SDE3 Level 4, LT421
You are cordially invited to attend the research seminar by Fu Yun:
Date: 27 Oct 2025
Time: 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4, LT421
Different Design Intelligences and Their Applications
Abstract:
When the two older siblings of the three little pigs rebuild their houses after the wolf attack, should they be compelled to rebuild in brick, given its recent proven success? If and how should the range of building types, and the different outlooks on life they reflect, be preserved or expanded? And how should a swine architect choose one way of building over another in a particular scenario, in anticipation of future challenges?
This presentation is organized around three clusters of recent and ongoing work, including:
1) modernization, resilience, and living well in a risky world,
2) material flows and temporal forms, and
3) housing and recasting ideas of the good life.
Each line of inquiry spans writing, design, and teaching, and demonstrates the necessary and useful reciprocity between, in Gilbert Ryle’s terms, “the knowing that” and “the knowing how.”
Together, these projects—from small everyday infrastructures and pop-up public spaces to studio courses that bridge design and advocacy by producing public-facing think pieces informing debates on housing policy—advance a central theme: the need to expand the repertoire of design intelligences recognized and available to contemporary practice. More specifically, they highlight the urgency of reactivating a capacity to rethink once familiar problems—such as sustainability, ideas of the good life, and design education—in the face of the novel and complex challenges confronting designers in the twenty-first century.
Yun FU is a partner at SEMESTER, a design and research studio, and faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he co-authors and coordinates the current iteration of the Architecture in Urban Design core studio and curriculum—the fourth since the program’s establishment in the 1960s.
He is the author of several books on design intelligences and modern architecture in the Asia-Pacific. His most recent, Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground (2023), received a Graham Foundation grant and the 2024 DAM Architecture Book Award. Yun has held the Rome Prize at the British School, where he studied the architecture of street life; the Sinclair Kennedy Travelling Fellowship for fieldwork across the Pacific Rim; and the Confucius Visiting Scholarship at Peking University, where he examined models of post-disaster reconstruction.
His ongoing projects include Designing Forevers: On Different Imaginations of Sustainability (2027), a book in development with support from the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities; Living Well in a Risky World (2026), an exhibition and journal special issue on public space-making by emerging practices in the Asia-Pacific; and What to Do With All These Concrete Buildings, a research-design project in Hangzhou exploring the adaptive reuse of pervasive modernist housing complexes for contemporary work/live arrangements.