As a boy, Wu attended the Lingnan Middle School in Hong Kong where he was further exposed to Western art, culture and ideas.
The graduate school of architecture at Harvard, at this time, was under the direction of Walter Gropius, former director of the Bauhaus, who had arrived in the United States in 1937.
Wu's classmates and instructors Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen and Philip Johnson would achieve fame for their subsequent groundbreaking modern work in New Canaan, Connecticut as members of the "Harvard Five."
Wu spent several months in China, charged by the trustees with the task of creating buildings that were "simple and inexpensive to construct" with a beauty being "that of grace and proportion rather than of decoration and monumental design".
Wu produced designs and studies for thirty-seven new buildings that included dormitories, libraries, classrooms, medical offices and related facilities.
Throughout his creative work, Wu sought to integrate the Western enthrallment with technology, as seen in rationalism of the Bauhaus, with Chinese romanticism, as in his belief in the intrinsic calming aspect of the home expressed in his preference for the warmth of organic materials, natural light and picturesque views.
By now, the earlier rectilinear plans had evolved into more complex forms, with brick and rough textured block replacing wood for siding and structure.
Wu continued to use large, fixed expanses of plate glass and relied on moveable openings on window sills for natural ventilation, as he had done in the earlier houses.
The neat, rhythmic pattern of glass in the early houses evolved into an often incomprehensible and varied placement of windows of various sizes and shapes in the later work.
Located on a corner lot in a developed residential area, the white aggregate block walls of the Wu house reveal little of the rich interiors within.
In 1979, Wu followed similar principles in his smallest residential assignment: designing a rear addition for the house of his friends, Theodore Pian and Rulan Chao Pian, sited on a small lot on a private way of early-modern houses at 14 Brattle Circle, off Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In this new addition, unusually large windows, sited around a small but comfortable spiral stairway, bring remarkable light to the existing living room, as well as to the new kitchen and finished basement of this otherwise un-sunlit early-modern home, originally constructed during the dark war years of 1942–3.
In addition to Stern himself, other former Wu students include leading architects Stanley Tigerman, Maya Lin, Norman Foster, Richard Rodgers, and Hugh Newell Jacobsen.
Paul Goldberger wrote, "His long, quiet tenure and courtly manner contrasted with a changing cast of large and sometimes clashing egos on the faculty."