Digital Beijing

摘要

When Zhu Pei and his partner, Wu Tong, began designing Digital Beijing for a site on the western edge of the Olympic Green, the National Swimming Center and National Stadium were already under construction. With such iconic structures-the so-called Water Cube and Bird's Nest-within sight of their project, they decided to create a building that would act as a foil for the main Olympics venues, rather than try to echo them. (Zhu won the commission when he was a partner at Urbanus, before setting up his own firm in 2005.) "They are such clean, elegant packages," says Zhu of the two neighboring buildings, which have received the lion's share of media attention. "We wanted to design something that was uncultivated, masculine, and authentic," something that got "to the truth" of what China has become.