He was Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT (2005-2010). Since 1992, he has been practising in China and established FCJZ with Lijia Lu in 1993. He has received several prizes and recognitions, such as First Place in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition in 1986, Progressive Architecture Citation Award in 1996, 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, Academy Award in Architecture from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006, 2016 China Architecture Media Award Excellence in Practice Prize, and Honorary Membership of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Hong Kong.

FCJZ has been recognised as one of the 100+ Best Architecture Firms 2019 by Domus magazine. Recently, Jishou Art Museum, designed by FCJZ, won the AIA 2020 Architecture Award and the ArchDaily China Building of the Year 2020 Award.

He has taught at various architecture schools in the US and China; he was Professor and Founding Head of the Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University from 1999 to 2005; he held the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard GSD in 2002, the Eliel Saarinen Chair at Michigan in 2004, and between 2005 and 2010, he headed the Architecture Department at MIT. He was also a Pritzker Prize Jury member from 2012 to 2017.

He studied architecture at Nanjing Institute of Technology, China and science at Ball State University, USA before completing a Masters of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. He became a licensed architect in the US in 1989, has been practicing in China since 1992, and established Atelier FCJZ in 1993 with Lijia Lu.