Calvin Tsao is the founding partner of Tsao & McKown Architects and president emeritus of The Architectural League of New York. Sheng Yang / for China Daily

What is architecture? What is beauty? And if not an art object or a personality cult, what are the possibilities?

It took Calvin Tsao 30 years to draft out the answer sheet to those three questions, which he and his partner Zack McKown listed when they founded their design company Tsao & McKown Architects in New York in 1985.

"Our thirty years have been in search of beauty, a beauty that might be universal in the globalizing world," Tsao, president emeritus of The Architectural League of New York and board member of the American Academy in Rome, told China Daily in an interview at the Willard Hotel, a 200-year-old luxury Beaux-Arts hotel, which he used as an example.

Everything is "shining and luxurious" inside the hotel as a symbol of prosperity and materialism, but at the same time, it isolated human beings from a natural state, he said. "Something needs to be changed."

To Tsao, Shanghai, the city where his parents grew up and fell in love, became his first "DreamWorks studio", where he packaged his long-conceived ideas into a mind-body wellness center, an integrated utopian-like center to open in March.

Built on a French concession in Puxi District, Shanghai, and based on a vintage house of the 1950s with a rooftop for growing vegetables and playing Taiji, the Octave Living Room - an urban learning center for personal growth - aims to break the imbalance of development by hearkening back to an "ancient life" of natural and inner peace from the modern status quo of hustle and bustle.

"We hope people at the center can communicate more with people around them, for example, they can sit together and chat outside after dinner like old times," said Tsao, recalling his first time coming back to his motherland China in 1980s when everyone smiled to everyone and life was at ease and simple.

Born in Hong Kong in 1952, three years after his whole family settled down from Shanghai, Tsao, the eldest son in the family, was cultivated with both traditional Chinese and Western arts from the beginning.

"I started learning Chinese calligraphy and violin when I was only six," Tsao said. The house resonated with music between Tsao's violin, his sister's piano playing and his mother's Peking Opera singing. "I found that I was addicted to the arts."

His mother Zhou Meiqi grew up in a scholarly family and graduated with a bachelor's degree in education from Saint John's University in Shanghai, a prominent school during the Republic of China era.