King-lui Wu

King-lui Wu (1918–2002) was a Chinese-American architect and professor at Yale University from 1945–1988.

King-lui Wu was born in Guangzhou (Canton), China in 1918. Wu's father was a businessman, but despising the work, he also pursued painting and poetry writing. As a boy, Wu attended the Lingnan Middle School in Hong Kong where he was further exposed to Western art, culture and ideas. Impressed by the engineering feats then occurring in industrializing China, he decided early in life to become an architect. In 1937, he entered the University of Michigan to begin his studies. In 1938, he transferred to Yale University, attending until 1942. He subsequently switched to Harvard University.

The graduate school of architecture at Harvard, at this time, was under the direction of Walter Gropius, former director of the Bauhaus, who had arrived in the United States in 1937. This was a transitional time for the study of architecture and design at the school. The curriculum had changed radically as Gropius invited other former Bauhaus instructors to join the faculty. Wu's classmates and instructors Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen and Philip Johnson would achieve fame for their subsequent groundbreaking modern work in New Canaan, Connecticut as members of the "Harvard Five." Other noted classmates included I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph and Edward Larrabee Barnes.