“Coming Home”: Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu address CED graduating class of 2026
“Berkeley gave us a belief we have never lost — that architecture can change lives. That the spaces we make, the cities we shape, the boundaries we draw — they matter, deeply, to the people who live inside them.”
On a sunny morning in May, Lyndon Neri (BA Architecture 1987) and Rossana Hu (BA Architecture 1990) addressed graduating students and their families at the 2026 CED Commencement in the Greek Theatre.
Neri and Hu met at CED as undergraduate architecture students and went on to found Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, a globally recognized, award-winning practice. At the ceremony, both were presented with CED Distinguished Alumni Awards.
The themes of their moving and at times humorous keynote speech, “Coming Home,” resonated deeply with the audience: the meaning of home, the immigrant experience, and belonging.
Below are excerpts from their keynote address, which Neri and Hu delivered in alternating turns at the lectern.
Coming Home
Rossana Hu
Standing here is a strange feeling. Strange because this place is familiar — we know this campus, this light, this view — and yet we cannot quite get back inside the people we were when we were first here. The place is the same. We are not.
And there is no word in English for that particular ache: to stand somewhere you belong and feel, at the same time, that you have already lost it. Or perhaps that you lost it 30 years ago, and have only just come back to find out.
In German, they call it Sehnsucht — the longing for something you cannot fully name or possess, something always just beyond reach. In Portuguese, saudade — a bittersweet love for something absent, carried warmly in the body, like a letter you keep rereading long after you know it by heart. In Chinese, 乡愁. Xiāngchóu, the hometown ache. The particular grief of distance.
We are saying this not because our feelings matter today — this day is yours, not ours — but because we believe you are feeling something right now that you, also, don’t have a word for. The joy of finishing and the grief of ending. The pride and the fear. The belonging and the not-knowing-where-you-belong.
You left home to come here. And somewhere along the way — in a studio, late at night, in a friendship you didn’t plan for — this place became home too. And now you are leaving it. You will go somewhere new, and in time that place will become home, and you will leave that too, and on it goes.
But what is home? At its most basic, it is the first question architecture ever tried to answer. A shelter. A roof over your head. But we all know that home is not just a building. So what is it? We have spent thirty years trying to find out. And what we discovered surprised us.
1. Home is claimed
Lyndon Neri
We arrived at Berkeley three years apart — me first, then Rossana — and we started dating when Rossana was a freshman and I was a senior. Berkeley gave us many things we expected. And one thing we did not — each other. (That was not in the course catalog.)
But more than that, Berkeley gave us a belief we have never lost — that architecture can change lives. That the spaces we make, the cities we shape, the boundaries we draw — they matter, deeply, to the people who live inside them. That belief was formed here, in these four years at Wurster Hall. In the lectures we attended together every Wednesday night. In the five cups of coffee from Café Roma before every final review, staying up until the work was done. (We have never slept before a final review. We’re not sure we would recognize ourselves if we did.)
We came from immigrant families, growing up between worlds, not fully American and not of the homes we came from, and we had learned quietly and over many years to treat that in-between-ness as a deficiency. Something to overcome. Something to apologize for. We did not feel at home anywhere.
And then we took a class. Asian American Studies. At the time, Berkeley was one of the only universities in the country that offered it, and we walked in not knowing what we were about to receive. Professor Takaki stood at the front of Dwinelle and told us something we had never heard before — that Asian Americans were not guests in this country, that we helped build it, that our history was American history, that we were not strangers here.
We belonged.
When you have spent a lifetime feeling like a guest in your own home, being told you belong — by a scholar, in a lecture hall, backed by history — is not a small thing. It is the ground shifting beneath your feet.
Home is not given. It is claimed. It begins the moment you know that you have the right to be where you are standing. That class gave us permission to claim the place we were standing in. And more than that, it gave us a way to understand displacement — not as a wound, but as a vantage point. Because from the in-between, you can see both shores.
But we still didn’t know what to build.
2. Home is built from longing
Rossana Hu
Claiming home is only the beginning. Because when you are between worlds — as we were, as so many of you are — you belong fully to neither. And that gap creates an ache. A need for belonging that has nowhere to land. We had spent years treating that ache as a problem to be solved, a condition to be outgrown. What our graduate thesis work taught us was something entirely different.
My thesis looked at post-colonial Hong Kong — a city that was neither fully British nor fully Chinese, caught permanently in-between, belonging to no one tradition, no single identity. And what did Hong Kong do with that? It built one of the most inventive urban cultures in the world. When you belong fully to nothing, you have no choice but to invent yourself. The in-between was not Hong Kong’s problem. It was Hong Kong’s position.
Lyndon Neri
And I did my thesis on Locke, California — the first rural Chinatown in America, built in the 1910s by Chinese laborers who were legally barred from owning land. They built an entire community on ground they could never legally own. Stores, temples, homes, a school. A home made entirely from homesickness. And yet Locke stands today as the most complete expression of Chinese American identity in built form that exists. They designed belonging out of the very condition of not belonging.
The in-between doesn’t prevent home. It demands it.
There are two kinds of nostalgia, and only one of them is dangerous. The dangerous kind tries to freeze the past exactly as it was — to deny that time has passed, to insist that what was lost can be recovered without remainder. What we are describing is something else entirely: the longing that learns to live with the distance between past and present, that finds in that distance not grief but possibility, that uses the ache as a creative force rather than a wound.
We did not cure our nostalgia.
We made it a practice.
We also made it into our pedagogy — today we teach design studios that bring students to Chinatowns across America and around the world — to the ones that are thriving, and the ones that are disappearing.
And then the answer came not from a city. But from a single room.
3. Home is the ordinary made profound
Rossana Hu
I was a student in Donlyn Lyndon’s studio, standing inside a house at Sea Ranch on the California coast, when I noticed something small. The copper plumbing pipes — meant to carry water, hidden behind walls — had been turned into door handles and towel bars.
The pipe was simply allowed to be what it already was. And somehow, that permission made it beautiful.
There was a moment of awe, quiet and private, just me and an object in a room. The most ordinary thing — plumbing — made profound by someone who paid close enough attention to see it. I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment everything began.
Today, Neri&Hu designs furniture, hardware, and objects for homes and brands around the world — and every single piece traces back to that pipe. To that coast. To a student standing in a room not yet knowing who she was about to become.
The architect who made that pipe into a door handle was not designing for me. He was designing for a stranger who hadn’t arrived yet. We do not design for the person standing in front of us. We design for the stranger who will someday stand in that place and feel something they cannot fully name. Our job is to make sure that feeling is worth having.
Because that feeling — the one a stranger finds in a room someone else made for them — is what home feels like when it arrives unexpectedly.
So we leave you with two things. The first is for yourself. Know what home means to you — the person, the place, the feeling you would drive back to in the dark. That knowledge is your sharpest design tool. Let your homesickness make you more precise. Let your longing make you more generous. Let the in-between be the ground you build from — because the world does not need designers who think they know all the answers. It needs designers who know what it cost to get there.
Lyndon Neri
The second is for others. There are people in this world homesick for a home that has never been built for them — not only because they lack shelter, but because no one has ever designed a place with them in mind. Not the building, not the neighborhood, not the park, not the policy that decided who gets to stay and who gets pushed out. The displaced. The unhoused. The communities unmade by planning decisions and disaster, and decades of being invisible to the people with the pencils.
We have spent a century designing for comfort. We have barely begun designing for belonging.
You have the pencils now.