page_title: Digital Beijing Building
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Digital Beijing Building / History
caption_attribution_description: 中文（简体）‎: 数字北京大厦，从南侧拍摄。English: Side view of Digital Beijing Building, designed by Pei Zhu
context_page_description: The Digital Beijing Building is located northwest of the intersection of Beichen West and Anxiang North roads, on Olympic Green, in the Chaoyang District of Beijing, China. It is a 57-metre-tall block-shaped building erected to serve as a data center during the 2008 Summer Olympics. Since then it has served as both a museum devoted to the use of computing in the Olympics, and exhibition space for digital technology companies.
  It was the only major facility on Olympic Green not to be an event venue for the games, and the only major Olympic facility designed by a Chinese architect. That architect, Pei Zhu, was interested in the connections between traditional Chinese design and digital technology. He produced a sustainable building that resembles a circuit board when viewed from either side and a bar code when viewed from either end, in the process using some new materials for the first time in China. It has been both praised for its avoidance of kitsch and criticized as resembling Orwell's Ministry of Truth. At the 2008 World Architecture Festival it was shortlisted in its category.
context_section_description: Once Beijing was awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics in 2001, planning began for the Games, and the Olympic Green area in the city's Chaoyang District that would host the Olympic Village and many major event venues. One theme of the Olympics was to be the "Digital Olympics", using more new information technology than had ever before been used in the Olympics. Early in 2002, the city's Municipal Informatization Office called for a "landmark building" to use as the main data center during the Games and for other, related purposes afterwards.
  A contest was held, and the design by Pei Zhu, then with the Chinese firm Urbanus but in the process of setting up his own Pei Zhu Studio, was chosen from among eight competitors in 2004. It was the only major facility among the 31 new buildings to have been designed by a Chinese architect. It was also the only Olympic Green building that was not an Olympic event venue.
  "If the industrial revolution resulted in modernism, contemporary architecture needs to explore what will form out of the current revolution of information," Zhu wrote later. "Conceptually, Digital Beijing was developed through reconsideration and reflection on the role of Chinese architecture in the modern information era. [It] helps to develop a new aesthetic, an architectural language that is thoroughly contemporary, but retains a Chinese texture and sensibility."
  To that end, the building he designed echoes the tools it was designed to house. From the ends it resembles a bar code, rising from the water. Zhu explains:
  The abstracted mass of the building, reflecting the simple repetition of 0 and 1 in its alternation between void and solid, recreates on a monumental scale the microscopic underpinnings of life in the digital age to form a potent symbol of the Digital Olympics and the Digital Era ... The three bars that reflect the solid typology are physical manifestations of information technology. Inside are all of the computers and machines that make up the mainframe.
  The east and west facades offer a contrast between the windowless western side, continuing to emphasize the building's contents and purpose by being decorated to resemble a circuit board, and the open, glassy easy. This contrast of extremes, according to Zhu, is what the building draws from Chinese culture, specifically the hutong, the narrow mazes of alleyways where much of Beijing's traditional street life and community took place. "On the exterior transparency is very rare, where internally the true interaction between nature, open space and building is most evident." He concludes "Through the perspective of Chinese philosophy, everything including the advancement of technology has an intimate connection with the natural realm. Aesthetically this perspective continues a dialogue between the past and the future."
  Construction began in 2005. During that time Zhu and the builders were to take advantage of two newly developed materials. The first, a translucent fiber reinforced plastic, had first been developed for a hotel Zhu was building elsewhere in Beijing as a substitute for jade, which proved too expensive to use in the quantity he had wanted it. Since it held images projected in it well, he also decided to use it for the flooring inside Digital Beijing, where it could become a "digital carpet", similar to the "urban carpet" Zaha Hadid created for the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was also strong enough to support the interior footbridges, so Zhu used it there too. On the exterior, a local maker of beverage cans developed the aluminum sheets for the building's facades that gleam in places yet still look like stone from far away.
  The building was completed and opened on 3 November 2007. It served as the main data center during the Summer Games the following year, as intended (a backup was built in an undisclosed location). Since then it has served, also as planned, as a museum of the Digital Olympics and exhibition space, both concentrated in the public area of the building on the east, where the interior is visible. "D
caption: South elevation, 2011, with "alternation between void and solid" visible
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