Chu set up his own studio, Artefact Architects, in 2014 and since then, has continuously been on the lookout for design competitions to enter.
He spotted an ad for the Not A Hotel competition just one day before the official briefing and decided to go for it.
The competition was founded in 2020 and is exclusively for architects aged under 40. Chu was 39 when he entered his design, Sound of Rain, last year.
His entry was inspired by the site where the 2026 winning design will be built, on Japan’s Yakushima – a UNESCO World Heritage island famed for its dense cedar forests.
“It's like this ancient magical site where it rains every day and there's 3000-year-old trees everywhere,” Chu said.
“I thought, ‘I have to do this’. So I just cleared up my schedule and I thought, ‘Okay, what the hell? If I have one shot, I'll take it’.”
Using a literary methodology, where he writes before drawing, Chu began researching the island and always kept coming back to the theme of rain.
“So, when I asked ‘What is rain?’, the poetics that came to me was that rain is gravity made invisible, rain is time made audible and rain is the moment the sky meets the earth,” he said.
“Obviously, there's a bit of poetic licence there to define rain and such, but I knew I could work with these three lines to generate a kind of architecture that was ancient, but also futuristic at the same time. Gravitational, but also sort of suspended.”
Chu won the 2026 prize, earning himself $80,000 (AUD) and oversight of the construction of his design. Judges, including acclaimed Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, praised Chu’s integration of architecture with nature and the building’s bowl-like rooftop to capture rain.
“In my heart, deeply, I believed in Sound of Rain,” he said.
“I've worked for 20 years for this moment and there's been no recognition at times, and no hope as well. I’ve basically just worked quietly without any kind of reward or recognition, always self-propelled by my own belief.”
