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When David Hu was earning his undergraduate architecture degree in Taiwan, he learned a very important lesson about architecture. But he didn't learn it in school. He learned it in the nightclubs where he was singing with his band. "I realized you have to learn how to understand people in order to communicate architecture to them," Hu said. "We're dealing with people who don't have a lot of time to think about buildings, so you have to work with them to bring out that interest, that desire. And then maybe you'll be able to do something that has a special life to it. But dealing with people isn't a skill they teach us in our training. The ability to listen to people that I picked up in my music days has helped me a lot." Hu's concentration on relationships has brought him some of his best work to date, and his ommunication skills have produced some wildly different architecture for the same client, and even for the same client with an almost identical program. In this case, the two Wild Lily Tearooms, both in New York City, reflect two different "moods" of tea. The first Wild Lily is in the Chelsea neighborhood and reflects a masculine aesthetic, with warm woods, brick, a lily pond, and straight lines everywhere. The newer of the two locations is a smaller storefront where Hu felt that straight lines would be too dominating. So curves became the norm, and transparent materials entered the picture. There was also no room for the signature lily pond, so Hu worked with the owner of the teahouses to come up with a compromise, an almost unseen— but not unheard, at his client's request— waterfall, that trickles behind a transparent resin wall that has tea leaves embedded in it. Shelves for tea boxes are imprinted with his client's favorite poem. Hu started his New York practice in 1996, after several years in Taipei. It was a fateful time for him. He had no clients in the U.S., though he did earn his M. Arch. at Washington University in St. Louis and was not a complete stranger to the country. "Coming to New York was a leap of faith," Hu said. "But, you can never wait for things to happen. You have to make them happen." Hu got his hands on an early project, the remodeling of a loft, but he was soon laid up with a stroke. "My client at the time heard that I had a stroke," Hu said, "and she said, ‘Well, he's out of the picture.' I called her up, and she said, ‘Can you still do it?' And I said, ‘Yes, I can.' I couldn't do the sketches to the same detail that I usually could, but I spent more time with the contractor out on the site." But Hu's leap of faith and his persistence through what he refers to as a "convergence of cosmic forces" have really paid off for him. He continues to shuttle back and forth between New York and the Far East, and has residential and commercial projects in his portfolio, as well as an interesting commission to design a temporary sales-office building for a speculative residential tower in Taiwan. And on top of that, he's designing his own chess set. Is it something akin to fate that has Hu's career looking up, or is it his hard work? He has his own, slightly cryptic, answer: "My contractor, who's Chinese, told me—I don't know if it's a proverb or not—but he said, ‘If you build a temple, the people will come to burn their incense.' " by Kevin Lerner
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