There was nothing virtual about Yu's talent

George Yu, who died last weekend at age 43 of a rare form of lung cancer that afflicts nonsmokers, was a refreshing anomaly among Los Angeles architects. In a field of relentless self-promoters, Yu was quietly but forcefully candid, even about the limitations of his own work. He was fully versed in computer-aided design but careful -- even eager -- to test the limits of the digital technology against physics and the demands of clients.

With a deep interest in digital design tempered by an obsession with the act of making, Yu emerged in the last five years or so as an important link between the city's leading firms and architects in their 20s and 30s, many of whom Yu taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and elsewhere.

His work had expanded in recent years to fill the wide range between the minute and the urban -- between the detail of a door handle in a new backyard studio for his home in Culver City, where he lived with his wife and two daughters, and the future of whole city districts. His recent competition entries -- notably one with landscape architect Calvin Abe for the Singapore waterfront -- suggested it was, in part, a keen and developing interest in urbanism that would keep him near the forefront of young L.A. designers.

Yu, who was born in Hong Kong in 1964 and grew up in British Columbia, earned a graduate degree from UCLA and worked early in his career for Morphosis, the Santa Monica firm led by Thom Mayne. He struck out on his own in 1992, when he was 28 -- in the middle of an economic downturn. He paid the bills with teaching jobs and briefly moved his office to Vancouver.

By the end of the 1990s, by which time he had founded a firm called Design Office with Jason King and was back in L.A., he had work from a growing group of commercial clients that would eventually include Sony, Max Studio and IBM. He won a Rome Prize fellowship from the Canadian government in 2000 and reestablished his own firm, George Yu Architects, soon after.

He therefore brought to his refined, elegant work a range of personal and architectural experience well suited to polyglot L.A., a cutting-edge Pacific Rim city whose old-fashioned architectural taste still needs shaking up. He was "a Chinese-Canadian-American," as his friend Howard Davies put it, "who could step lightly across subjects as seemingly diverse as shopping malls and surf music." He was a globally minded, techno-savvy family man equally obsessed with hockey and the history of Italian architecture.