Studio Pei-Zhu, Bijing.

The husband-wife partnership of Pei Zhu and Tong Wu established their office in 2005. He graduated from Tsinghua University, got his M Arch at UC Berkeley, and spent three years as a partner in the Bijing office of Urbanus ([p.sup.88]), where he developed the design for the Digital Building, a major component of the Olympic Park. Her degrees from T singhua are in art, design and literature, which gives the partnership its unique character. 'We want to create something beyond architecture,' says Zhu. 'It's a team effort; we invite people from different disciplines to participate in our projects, and we borrow from industry and fashion.

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Digital embodies those complementary strands. Zhu and the Urbanus team won an international competition to design the 100 000 square metre Olympic control and data centre as a symbol of technology. Dark reinforced-concrete monoliths dissolve in light and the long facades abstract the imagery of microchips, integrated circuit boards and digital bar codes. The building will serve as a communications hub during the Olympics and will later accommodate a museum and an exhibition centre for manufactures of digital products.

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Zhu grew up in an old neighbourhood of the capital and he views the large-scale buildings that disrupt the rhythm and flow of the old city as cancerous tumours. The Kapok Hotel (initially called the Blur) is a response to that sense of dislocation;'an experiment in urban acupuncture', as the architect describes it. 'Rather than operate and remove the tumour (in other words, demolish yet again) a less disruptive method is to leave it in place and neutralise its ill effcets'. A six-storey government office building, located a block east of the Forbidden City, was stripped to its concrete frame. The studio opened up the ground floor, inserted as glass-walled courtyard at the centre and 15 internal pocket gardens and wrapped the exterior with a grid of fibre-reinforced plastic. The grid and gardens work as scaling devices to reduce the bulk of the building, which shimmers in the sun and glows at night like a Chinese lantern.

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In a more direct involvement with the old city, Zhu renovated a classic house for the celebrated artist Cai Guo-Qiang, adding a glass-walled building that seems to float, reflective and immaterial, within a restored courtyard.He also developed a conceptual plan for the regeneration of the Xisi Bei hutong district, proposing that intrusive buildings be transformed and exploited as 'urban incubators' to add density and diversity to the old residential fabric. This pragmatic approach offers a viable alternative to the wholesale redevelopment or reconstruction of these districts; strategies that displace the existing population.'The goal is to fuse contemporary ideas with the spirit of Chinese tradition,' says Zhu.

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Working on a much larger scale on the north side of the third ring road, the studio transformed an existing 12-storey office block into the Publishing House, a centre that will promote creativity and public interest in publishing. Taking their cues from an untidy stack of books. the architects have cantilevered floors out form the existing structural frame, creating what they call a 'micro-city' of open, interconnected spaces for work, learning, retail and leisure. In their design for the Guggenheim Art Pavilion in the cultural district of Abu Dhabi, the architects elaborate on this concept of free-floating geometries and interlocking volumes, designing a polygonal composition of folded planes. As Zhu explains,'the challenge was to create a sense of place where there is no place'. M.W.

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