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In Memory of David
Portrait of David Chen

David Chen

1955 — 2025

“He did the work. He
did not need anyone to notice.”

A life remembered

David’s Story

David Chen was an architect. He was born in Taipei, moved with his parents to San Francisco at eleven, and spent his whole working life at a small firm in Oakland that he joined at twenty-six and never left. He designed public buildings — libraries, mostly — and he designed them for the people who would spend Tuesday afternoons in them, not for the people who would cut the ribbons. He met Julia at Berkeley in the fall of 1979.

He was quiet. She was not. They were married in the spring, and they were married for forty-six years. He raised two sons who are also quiet, and one daughter who is not.

He kept a spare, well-lit desk. He read a lot. He listened more than he spoke. When he died he left behind twelve buildings that his own name was never on, and three children who each have his handwriting somewhere in the way they think.

1955 — 2025

David’s Journey

  1. 1955
    A small apartment in Da'an, Taipei. His father a civil engineer, his mother a mathematician turned homemaker.
  2. 1966
    San Francisco. A row house on Cabrillo. Eleven years old, four English words, and a natural talent for drawing.
  3. 1979
    Julia, in the studio at Berkeley. She was working on a plywood chair. He was working on a plywood table. They shared a jigsaw.
  4. 1981
    Chen Kwong Architects — three people in a one-room office in the Mission. Every building since has begun with a pencil.
  5. 2025
    A quiet Tuesday, the drafting table clear for the first time in forty-four years.
Chapters

David’s Life Chapters

The seasons that shaped a life — told as small pieces of a larger story.

David — Taipei
Chapter 1

Taipei

David was born in a small apartment in the Da'an district of Taipei, in the spring of 1955, six years after his parents had come to Taiwan from Shanghai. His father Kwong was a civil engineer, trained at Jiao Tong in the years before the war. His mother Mei had a mathematics degree from Yenching University in Beijing and had taught briefly at a girls' school before leaving for Taipei with her husband.

David was the older of two. His sister Alice came in 1958. The apartment had two rooms, a small balcony, and a view of a public park. His father worked long hours on the reconstruction of southern Taiwan's roads. His mother taught him mathematics at the kitchen table from the age of four.

He drew constantly. His mother saved everything — three ring binders full, before he was ten, of small careful pencil drawings of buildings, bridges, streetcars, and, once, an entire imagined city on the back of six pieces of taped-together brown paper. His father, who did not know quite what to do with a boy who preferred pencils to arithmetic, kept his own counsel and quietly bought David a drafting board for his tenth birthday.

1955
David — San Francisco
Chapter 2

San Francisco

His father took a position with a San Francisco engineering firm in 1966 and moved the family to a narrow row house in the Richmond district, on Cabrillo Street between 25th and 26th. David was eleven. He arrived speaking, according to his father, exactly four English words — yes, no, please, and, oddly, elevator.

He was enrolled in the sixth grade at George Washington High and was bewildered for approximately six months. He was fluent by the end of the school year. He credited, always, an English teacher named Mrs. Kellerman who lent him novels a level above his grade and made him write a paragraph a day about what he had read. He did not lose his slight Taiwanese accent, ever, and did not try to.

The row house had a small patch of back garden and a bay window in the front room. He commandeered the bay window as his drawing spot — the light was best there in the late afternoon — and he sat there almost every evening through high school. He was accepted to Berkeley for architecture in 1973 and drove across the bridge to school for four years in his mother's borrowed 1968 Volvo. He never lived more than fifteen miles from that row house for the rest of his life.

1966
David — Julia
Chapter 3

Julia

He met Julia Kwong in the woodshop at the Berkeley architecture studio in the spring semester of 1979. He was in his fourth year of the M.Arch. She was in her third year of the BFA in sculpture and was making a plywood chair. He was, at the exact moment she needed the jigsaw, using the jigsaw. He offered to trade her the jigsaw for her band saw. She said, "I already had the band saw. Now I need the jigsaw. What are you going to trade me for?"

He offered her dinner. She accepted. They ate spaghetti at a small Italian place on Shattuck. They talked for four and a half hours. He asked her afterwards if she would like to go for a walk. She said, "I would rather go home and finish this chair." She did. He came over the next day, to see the chair, and never really left again.

They married in 1982 at a small ceremony in Golden Gate Park. Julia designed the invitations. David designed the ceremony seating — a semicircle of forty chairs, each one a slightly different modernist prototype from his and Julia's studios, borrowed for the day. Nobody sat still. It was, David said later, the perfect wedding.

1979
David — The firm
Chapter 4

The firm

Chen Kwong Architects opened in the spring of 1981 in a one-room office on Valencia Street in the Mission. Three people: David, his classmate Ellis Park, and a bookkeeper named Diane who worked mornings only. Their first commission was a kitchen renovation for a friend's parents in Twin Peaks. Their second was an addition to a Victorian in Alamo Square. Their third, in 1983, was a small modernist house in Sonoma that would appear, three years later, in the Chronicle's Sunday magazine.

They grew slowly and by design. By 1995 they were fifteen people, working out of a converted warehouse on Bryant. By 2010 they had built somewhere around ninety houses, a dozen small commercial buildings, and one library. David was known — quietly, in Bay Area architecture circles — for a sort of restrained modernism that used ordinary materials with unusual precision. He believed, deeply, that architecture should let people be themselves.

He drew every project himself, in pencil, on paper, before it ever went into a computer. He kept a leather-bound sketchbook on his drafting table at all times and filled, over forty-four years, more than three hundred of them. Julia has them all. The firm is now run by two of his former associates. It still starts every project with a pencil.

1981
David — A quiet Tuesday
Chapter 5

A quiet Tuesday

He was diagnosed in the autumn of 2024. He continued working — reduced hours, from home, on a single project — through the winter. In February he told Julia that he wanted the drafting table cleared. She did it with him. They sorted forty-four years of drawings into a set of flat archival boxes that took the better part of a Saturday to fill.

On the last Tuesday of March 2025, he sat at the empty drafting table in the front room of the row house — the same room, the same bay window, that had been his drawing spot since 1966 — and drew, for two hours, a small sketch of the garden as it looked that morning. He signed it. He gave it to Julia. He said, "That is the last one."

He died two days later, at home, at seventy years old. Julia sat with him. She said, later, that at the very end he looked out the bay window at the garden and said something in Mandarin, quietly, that she did not quite catch. She wrote it down as best she could. It was a phrase from a Song dynasty poem his mother had taught him when he was six. It translates, roughly, as: The light is very clear this morning.

2025
Music

Songs David Loved

The music that filled the rooms — and the reasons why.

  1. Gymnopédie No. 1
    Erik Satie
    He played it while he drafted.
  2. Blue in Green
    Miles Davis
    Kind of Blue was the first record he bought in America.
  3. Music for 18 Musicians
    Steve Reich
    He said good architecture felt like this — patterns that reveal themselves slowly.
  4. Suzanne
    Leonard Cohen
    Julia's favorite. He learned every word.
  5. Spiegel im Spiegel
    Arvo Pärt
    Played at his memorial. There were no eulogies.
Legacy

Where He Came From

Shanghai engineers and Beijing scholars who left the mainland for Taiwan in 1949.

Before the Move to Da'an

David's grandfather Chen Weilin ran a small machine shop near the Shanghai waterfront from 1921, repairing textile equipment for mills along the Huangpu. His son Kwong, David's father, grew up in the workshop before studying engineering at Jiao Tong.

On his mother's side, David's grandfather Li Boqin taught classical literature at a Beijing academy for three decades. His daughter Mei broke from that tradition to study mathematics at Yenching, a choice her father questioned at first and came, eventually, to admire.

Chen Weilin's small machine workshop near the Shanghai waterfront, photographed around 1925.

Chen Weilin's small machine workshop near the Shanghai waterfront, photographed around 1925.

Family lines

The Chens of the Waterfront

1921-1949

Chen Weilin opened his machine shop near the Shanghai docks in 1921, repairing looms and spinning frames for nearby textile mills. He trained his son Kwong in basic mechanics before sending him to Jiao Tong for formal engineering study, a decision that shaped the whole family's path forward.

The Lis of the Academy

1908-1949

Li Boqin taught classical literature at a Beijing academy for over thirty years, known for demanding memorization of long passages from his students. He initially discouraged his daughter Mei from studying mathematics, believing it impractical for a woman of her background, then funded her tuition himself.

Places

The Shanghai workshop

1921-1949

Weilin's shop occupied a narrow brick building two streets back from the water, smelling always of machine oil and coal smoke. Kwong spent childhood afternoons there sorting bolts by size, a task he later said taught him more about precision than any classroom did.

The Beijing academy

1908-1946

Li Boqin's academy occupied a courtyard building near the old city wall, its classrooms arranged around a central garden. Mei studied there before switching to a mission school with a science program, a transfer her father arranged quietly rather than announce.

Objects kept

Weilin's calibration gauge

Weilin's calibration gauge

Weilin used this brass gauge daily to check tolerances on repaired loom parts. Kwong carried it in a small case when the family left for Taiwan in 1949, one of the few tools that made the crossing, and kept it on his own desk for the rest of his career.

Boqin's ink stone

Boqin's ink stone

Li Boqin ground ink on this stone every morning before his lectures, a ritual he kept for decades. Mei took it with her when she left Beijing, and it sat on David's own desk throughout his career, though he confessed he never once used it to grind ink himself.

Stories told

Sorting bolts by size

Kwong spent whole afternoons as a boy sorting loose bolts and washers into tins by size in his father's workshop, a chore he resented at the time. He later told David that the habit of sorting things precisely, without being told twice, was the most useful thing his own father ever taught him without meaning to.

The quiet transfer

When Li Boqin arranged for Mei to transfer to a mission school with a mathematics program, he told colleagues only that his daughter needed a change of air for her health. He attended her graduation without comment, then privately paid for a set of drafting instruments as a gift, saying nothing else about it to anyone in the family for years.

Letters

Remembrances

A few of the voices closest to David’s life.

He said less than any man I have ever known and meant more of it. Forty-six years I loved him. I am still learning what he was thinking.

Julia wife

My father taught me that quiet is not the absence of an opinion. It is the presence of a decision.

Marcus son

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