For dual architecture degree candidate Kelvin Vu, design begins with the body

Kelvin Vu took a unique path to studying design. While pursuing an environmental studies degree as an undergraduate at Yale, an Introduction to Architecture course piqued his interest. He took a design discovery program in landscape at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but returned to his first love: dance. Upon graduating from the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance (SFCD), he got what he describes as his dream job: a role as a dancer in the Young Ensemble of Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv. A year there turned into six.

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Now in 2025, Vu is set to graduate from Penn’s Weitzman School of Design with a dual master of architecture and master of landscape architecture degree. The four-year accelerated program has taught Vu how the history and theory of architecture informs landscape architecture, and vice versa. But he hasn't forgotten about his past in the performing arts. “My education at SFCD was intensely physical and intellectual at the same time,” Vu recalls.

“Both dance and landscape design are about change, flux, and dynamism,” he says. “To really seriously grapple with landscape, you have to consider the body.”

For Vu, those bodies are not just human bodies, but can also include animal and plant bodies. Building on his love for the outdoors and all things ecological, he has taken inspiration from theoretical frameworks such as Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s collaborative work, Donna Haraway’s interspecies thinking and Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur’s writing on the philosophy and metaphysics of plants, which offer nontraditional thinking about both landscape and technology.

“Like these authors’ work, my experience in dance has made it clear that there are many ways to think outside of traditional modes,” Vu says. “Knowledge doesn’t always happen in the rational frame.”

This story is by Matt Shaw. Read more at Weitzman News.