Li Hu leaned towards studying biology before settling on architecture – and his interest in evolution, complex systems and the building blocks of life still feed into his work today. After completing his undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1996, he moved to the United States to pursue a master’s degree at Rice University in Houston, Texas, which he completed in 1998. In 2000, he took a role at Steven Holl Architects in New York, where he eventually became a partner in 2005. During this time, he worked on a range of cultural, institutional, large-scale mixed-use schemes, as well as taking responsibility for several of the firm’s major projects projects in Asia, including the Linked Hybrid building in Beijing, Raffles City in Chengdu, the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing and the Vanke Center in Shenzhen. He established and led Steven Holl Architects’s Beijing office from 2005 till he left the practice in 2010.