[7] Digital Beijing is located on the northwest corner of the intersection of Beichen West, Anxiang North and Huizhong roads in the Olympic Green neighborhood of Beijing's Chaoyang District, a generally level area 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) north of the Forbidden City on the city's central axis.

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.

"Conceptually, Digital Beijing was developed through reconsideration and reflection on the role of Chinese architecture in the modern information era.

[7]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.

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.

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.

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.

"Digital Beijing accepts this transformation with a capacity for constant renovation, sprinting alongside the pace of our time," Zhu wrote.

He was the first Western journalist allowed to tour Olympic Green, most of which was still under construction and surrounded with a 4-metre-high (13 ft) steel fence under military guard to block it from public view.

He described Digital Beijing as "chees[y] ... Four gloomy stone slabs, divided by glass atria, do an excellent Orwellian Ministry of Truth impression."

[7] The next year, former New York Times critic Paul Goldberger wrote in his book Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflection on the Age of Architecture that while, like the adjacent Water Cube, Digital Beijing "steers dangerously close to a kitschy conceit", it, too, succeeds.

"[4] In 2011 Harvard professor Peter G. Rowe wrote at length about Digital Beijing in Emergent Architectural Territories in East Asian Cities.

"Although hardly the fault of architecture under such a presumption,", he wrote of Zhu's stated aesthetic intentions for the building, "this sort of symbol may seem somewhat at odds with the dispersed and uniquitous character of today's digital media."

[B]y calling such direct attention to this era in what will doubtless be a continuing information age, Studio Pei Zhu have perhaps marked the awkwardness, or uncertainty, many have about rapidly evolving technology today, and in a manner that might otherwise have gone unrecognized.