Davis Zhu

Portrait of a man with dark colored hair and glasses.
  • B.Arch, 2021
  • Hometown

    Vancouver, Canada

Davis Zhu is graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture and dual minors in Real Estate and Business Administration. Interested in the intersection of design, innovation, and finance to solve complex human problems, he's worked as an architectural designer at KPF, investment sales analyst at JLL, and asset management associate at UBS. Eventually, Davis hopes to establish himself as a disruptive yet socially responsible designer, developer, and entrepreneur.

During his time at Cornell, Davis has experimented with different styles and avenues of design from a hermit's dwelling on a fictional island to a 400-unit multifamily proposal in Berlin and a VR-designed mixed-use urban intervention in Flushing. His 5 years culminated with a thesis that challenges the role of the architect through partial equity ownership, suggesting that the architect's reward be pegged to the performance of design instead of a fixed fee based on scope. As well, he analyzed the impact of firm operation through a series of Monte Carlo simulations and built a framework for a valuation tool designed for architects.

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