What does it mean to “build a world”? The term is often used by science fiction and fantasy writers to describe the process of imagining and describing environments, landscapes, and characteristics beyond the scope of referenceable reality. 

This practice of radical imagination can extend to all corners of life, from the make-believe games that children play to the reforesting of once-wild places to painting a mural, transforming the side of a building with pigment and shape.  

Many GFS alumni are working hard to not only change our world, but to craft new ones inside of it, pockets of hope, resistance, and joy that cast circles of light. Inside these worlds are specific logic, language, characters, and poetics. 

Meet writer and illustrator Sarah Jacoby '01, architect Noah Yaffe '90, and app designer Steven Songqui Pu '20—three alumni whose works speaks to world-building in very distinct ways.

Sarah Jacoby '01: Watercolor Worlds

 

The worlds in Sarah Jacoby’s artwork are soft and welcoming, gentle landscapes populated by charming creatures, abstracted plants, cheerful buildings, and colorful people. 

“I like to create scenes that come from my heart,” Jacoby said. “They aren’t 100% based in reality, and there's always whimsy and humor.”

Jacoby has worked for over a decade as a commercial illustrator, with work featured in publications such as in The New York Times, American Illustration, and Pitchfork Media’s website. 

She is the author-illustrator of three children’s books, all of which are tender stories about kindness and self-acceptance. Forever or a Day is a quiet meditation on the nature of time; Can I Sit With You? explores the power of friendship and loyalty; and Doris tells the story of a free-spirited horse. She has also illustrated a number of other children’s books, including Rabbit and the Motorbike, So Much Snow, and The Coziest Place on the Moon, among others. 

With such a vibrant career, it’s hard to believe that throughout her education at GFS and in college, she didn’t really consider herself an artist.

“I loved my art classes at GFS, especially painting with Denny Heck [the late GFS teacher and alumna from Class of 1963], but I was never the best artist,” said Jacoby with a laugh. “I didn’t want to do ‘art with a capital A’, which I thought meant being a sculptor or painter with solo shows in New York.”

Instead, Jacoby traveled down a liberal arts path, studying English at Haverford College and cinema studies at Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate. Later, she did marketing work for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, played in bands, and taught students digital media skills at the University of Pennsylvania Library. 

It wasn’t until a co-worker showed her work from their illustration program at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) that Jacoby considered commercial art as a viable career path. Suddenly, the doodles and drawings she captured in stacks of sketchbooks took on a sense of possibility.

“I liked the idea that in commercial art, you're not the hero of your work,” she said. “It’s storytelling in service of something else.” 

After traveling around the country in a van with her husband and a stint living in Los Angeles, Jacoby applied to graduate school in 2013. She decided to attend MICA to pursue a two-year MFA program with a concentration in illustration. She found that she thrived in the art school environment, although it was quite different from the liberal arts schools she’d previously attended.

“At art school you have to put your work up on a wall and everyone judges it—I responded well to that,” she said. It makes you tougher, and you build some muscle around being a thoughtful critic.”

After MICA, Jacoby moved to Brooklyn to work for an educational app, TinyBop. During that time, Jacoby connected with a children’s book agency, Writer’s House, whose roster included authors and illustrators she admired. After seeing her senior thesis project, an agent, Steven Malk, asked if she’d consider creating a children’s book and helped her develop her portfolio. A year later, she won a prestigious award from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, which gave her the courage to quit her day job and focus on becoming a full-time illustrator. 

She sold her first book, Forever or a Day, to Chronicle Books; it was released in 2018. From there, her list of freelance clients and book bylines grew. Her perception of herself has shifted as she’s found her footing in the industry, and her art has changed some, too. 

“When I first started out, my people and creatures were so small,” she remembered. “As I get older and more confident, my work is bigger, more fantastical, and more abstract than what I'd been doing in the past.”

Even with her evolution as an artist, her style remains instantly recognizable. Each one of her pieces, from standalone prints to her books, contains little dreamy, watercolor worlds, inspired by nature yet following her own visual language. None of this is possible, she asserts, without finely-honed technical skills and a deeper grasp of art theory. 

“You need to employ rules to create a world, and then use line, color, and composition to reinforce those rules,” she said. “I really started learning all of that at GFS.”

Jacoby and her family have put roots down in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, where she works out of their rowhome. In addition to ideating future books and collaborations, she’s started experimenting in ceramics and more personal painting. No matter what mediums Jacoby experiments with, the essence of her aesthetic—and the optimism behind it—will no doubt be on full display.  

 

Noah Yaffe '90: Knowledge in the Hands

 

Noah Yaffe’s love of architecture started, so to speak, on the ground floor. In 1989, he spent his GFS Junior Project in Martha’s Vineyard, swinging a hammer for a worker-owned and operated design/build firm, South Mountain Company. He was intrigued to learn the rhythms of the island in the off-season, and exhilarated to watch the components of a building slowly coalesce. The experience opened his eyes to both the power of non-traditional learning environments and the profound joys of working with one’s hands.  

“The people at South Mountain were very passionate about their work and had this deep knowledge of craft, design, and construction,” Yaffe remembered. “Most of them were highly educated, but had chosen this other path, and that helped break down a binary for me between knowledge in the hands and knowledge in the brain.”

After GFS, Yaffe attended Colorado College, and then dabbled in furniture making and design/build work in Martha’s Vineyard and Montana. In 2002, he attended a career discovery workshop at Harvard University, which drew his attention to architecture. He enrolled in Harvard Graduate School of Design and graduated in 2004.

Soon after, he took an entry-level position at Steven Holl Architects, a New York-based firm of international renown. Right away, Yaffe felt at home in the studio environment; it reminded him a bit of the third floor of the Main Building, where he’d spent many hours at GF in art classes with formative teachers including David Welch, Denny Heck, and Elissa (Factor) Sunshine.

“The Steven Holl studio is filled with models and objects that connect materiality with making and learning through intuition, all of which made this place really appealing to me,” he said. 

Yaffe has remained with Steven Holl Architects for the last 22 years; he’s now a partner, and a partner-in-charge for a number of landmark projects. One of the first major projects that Yaffe oversaw was the HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Herning, Denmark. This museum originally opened in 1976 in the Angli shirt factory; a new building to expand the museum’s footprint was awarded to Steven Holl Architects in 2005, and the space opened in 2009.

 

The new museum building mirrors the site’s history of textile manufacturing: the roof’s curving geometry resembles overlapping shirt sleeves; the gaps between the “sleeves” are windows at the tops of the gallery spaces. The concrete walls were imprinted with tarps to mimic the texture of wrinkled fabric, a technique Yaffe believes is original to this site. 

 

Each detail, from the moveable gallery walls, to the community-oriented spaces, to the numerous sustainability features, evinces Yaffe’s and the firm’s ethos that each site and its circumstances are unique and deserve a unique response. 

“Our work merges art, architecture, and the environment, shaping the landscape and geometry into its own world,” he said. “A language can emerge from a place.” 

One of Yaffe’s more recent projects is the Lewis Arts Complex at Princeton University, a performing arts hub that opened in 2017. Though the sharp, clean lines and dramatic proportions of this structure may seem in contrast to the centuries-old buildings around it, great care was taken to echo the existing architectural conventions. For instance, the Lewis Arts Complex is a three-sided space, as are many of the historic buildings on the University’s campus.

 

“It’s deeply rooted in the design language of Princeton’s campus,” Yaffe noted. “We used Fibonacci proportions and the golden ratio—we’re secret classicists.” 

Currently, Yaffe is leading the design of the new Student Performing Arts Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which is set to open in 2027. It will feature multiple performance and rehearsal spaces housed in a terra cotta-hued building shaped like three suspended trapezoids. Each shape is meant to represent the movements of dancers. 

 

It is through this kind of design imagination, one that seeks a core idea rooted in a specific place, that Yaffe and his team endeavor not only to solve material problems, but to build worlds.

“We don’t see a binary between function and form, but instead are looking for concepts and ideals that meet the aspirations of a project,” he said. “There’s an inherent optimism with architecture, and we aim to create mini-utopias that reach the highest ideals of ourselves, our clients, and the communities they serve.”

 

Steven Songqui Pu '20

 

Steven Songqi Pu is a true interdisciplinarian: in the six years since graduating from GFS, he has built apps, sold a company, made a viral horror film, and studied Michelin-starred hospitality. The worlds he’s built live in the invisible architecture of code, pixels onscreen, and choreographies on the dining floor. 

And, although on the surface, coding, filmmaking, and hospitality might seem quite different, to Pu, they are all connected. 

"Filmmaking is 2D art, restaurants are 3D art, and computing is a 4D art," Pu said. "They require the same craft, intention, intensity, and ambition—except in computing, the ingredients you are working with are infinitely more complex and unpredictable."

Pu attended Stanford University from 2020 through 2025. There, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Symbolic Systems, an interdisciplinary major that blends cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science, followed by a master’s degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Throughout these years, he wrote a lot of code. His coding approach was anchored by a software engineering concept of object-oriented programming. He compares the process of creating separate structural pieces that function together to cellular biology or LEGO bricks, interlocking to create a coherent ecosystem.

“You’re writing programs the way you build a world,” Pu explained. “The program is like a castle you’ve been building up, but all the pipes and pieces inside need to make sense, and some need to be optimized.”

While at Stanford, Pu’s inherent curiosity also drew him back to filmmaking, a medium he first explored at GFS as an organizer of the Philadelphia Youth Film Festival (PHYFF).

 

While living in a windowless, labyrinthine campus dormitory known familiarly as EVGR, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it would make the perfect setting for a horror film. On a whim, Pu wrote, directed, and shot a three-minute short with the building's eerie, isolating architecture and a mysterious painting as its central characters. The film became a viral sensation on campus. Recognizing it as a successful prototype, Pu scaled up the world for a longer sequel, Second Nature, in the summer of 2024.

He pitched the concept to the broader collegiate film community and assembled talent and a crew from Stanford, Brown, and NYU. He even consulted legendary feature film sound designer Tom Myers ’76, who worked on blockbusters such as Toy Story and Wall-E. The resulting 13-minute film exploded across social media, amassing over 25 million views.

 

 

This fascination with how environments can shape human emotions also led Pu into an independent study of world-class hospitality. Pu observed closely at two Bay-Area Michelin-starred restaurants, Sons & Daughters and Kiln, to study their behind-the-scenes operations. What he discovered was that high-end service requires a similar orchestration to directing a film crew or running a start-up company.

“I’ve always been fascinated with hospitality and service, and how when I walk into an IKEA, an Apple store—and certainly when I’m at GFS—I feel so taken care of,” he said. “Studying how these restaurants operate reinforced for me that some of the world’s biggest, best companies are hospitality at their core.”

Following graduate school, Pu launched his first startup, Lyla. Originally designed as an AI mascot for live streaming, he pivoted the product to solve communicative friction between e-commerce vendors and customers. Lyla caught the attention of a major client and resulted in a successful corporate acquisition.

Today, Pu is busy building his second company, focusing on what he considers the ultimate frontier of human perception: time. By building intuitive user interfaces, he is designing tools that he believes will allow everyday people to leverage custom, automated AI workflows that run continuously overnight.

"Time is our most precious resource,” Pu said. “Because of AI, a parallel timeline is being constructed where work happens 24/7 while we sleep—we can actually reclaim control over a massive part of our lives."

For Pu, the confidence to experiment across different dimensions traces directly back to his formative years at GFS. He is grateful to PHYFF faculty advisors André Robert Lee ’89, Sarah Kappel, and Kate Garrity for helping him discover his entrepreneurial side by organizing the festival.

 

“Opportunities like PHYFF really exposed me to what it feels like to put things together, to share things you’ve worked on, and to connect with people on similar journeys,” Pu said. “I appreciate people who support endeavors like that. 

Pu also credits a number of his Upper School teachers with introducing “design thinking" frameworks that felt instantly familiar when he began studying at Stanford’s d.school [another GFS connection: the school’s Executive Director is Sarah Stein Greenberg '96!]. They were the very same principles of empathy, iteration, and structural imagination he had already practiced as a high schooler at GFS.

—Emily Kovach

 

This article was originally published in the Summer 2026 issue of the GFS Bulletin.

 

Feature image courtesy of Steven Holl Architects.