Sophia Hu

Fabric & Fabrication

The tale behind Sophia Hu’s Saul Bell Award-winning Turning pieces involves three quite disparate elements: fabric, jewelry design, and traditional Chinese woodworking. A former architect who came to jewelry only six years ago, Hu brings together the technical skill of her professional life and the inspiration of the grand structures she saw all around her childhood home in Beijing—and captures them in soft fabric.

“Growing up in Beijing, I was always fascinated by the joints in Chinese wood structure,” she says. “The beauty of it is how it depends on the way the wood is joined together, with intersecting or overlapping joints. From small furniture to a grand palace, they all use some basic joints. There’s a perfect logic in that construction, so I tried to learn from that.”

That fascination fostered her career in architecture, which subsequently informed how she approaches her jewelry work. “One of an architect’s main roles is to specify the ri...