Zhu Pei is in a cheerful mood, hurrying around his office, scribbled sketches in hand. The Beijing-born architect has reason to feel upbeat. He's fast becoming a leading light in the design world, with a reputation for the innovative use of textures and locally developed materials.
Perhaps the highest-profile of his projects is Digital Beijing, the data and communications centre for the 2008 Olympics. Zhu says he designed the building - inspired by a computer motherboard - to reflect modern Beijing and 'to provide a new architecture of our time'.
The complex will feature a kind of frosted fibreglass Zhu spent six months working with a local manufacturer to create. Resembling translucent jade, it will be used for flooring on the ground level. Zhu plans to project digital images onto the surface. 'I realised it could also be used as a screen,' he says.
As in many of his innovations, the inspiration is Chinese. With the fibreglass, Zhu wanted a material that replicates the quality of light he recalls from growing up in Beijing.
'One of my earliest memories is of waking up in my family's courtyard home and looking outside but not seeing clearly, because I was looking through paper shades [on the windows], not glass,' he says. 'You saw shadows and not images.'
His parents were allocated public housing when Zhu was seven, but he never forgot the luminous light.