Zhu Pei Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Zhu Pei (born 1962) is a Chinese architect and educator, founder of Studio Zhu-Pei in Beijing and dean of the School of Architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His buildings draw on Chinese landscape, craft and ways of living, from the Digital Beijing building for the 2008 Olympics to the Minsheng Museum in Shanghai, the Shou County Culture and Art Center and the Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum, built of vaults of recycled kiln bricks.

Beijing and Berkeley

Zhu Pei was born in Beijing in 1962. He studied architecture at Tsinghua University and at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked in the United States before returning to China, where he founded Studio Zhu-Pei in Beijing in 2005.

Olympic Beijing and Shanghai

His Digital Beijing building (2008), a control and data centre for the Beijing Olympics with a facade inspired by circuit boards, brought him international attention. In Shanghai he converted a factory into the Minsheng Museum of Modern Art (2010), and in Beijing he renovated the courtyard house and studio of the artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

Jingdezhen and Shou County

Zhu’s recent works are rooted in what he calls “experiential nature”. The Shou County Culture and Art Center in Anhui (2019) reinterprets the courtyard house and the old walled city, and the Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum (2020), a series of brick vaults recalling traditional kilns on the site of the imperial porcelain workshops, won wide international acclaim. The Zijing Conference Camp (2022) continued this work.