Pirated Buildings In China And The Rise Of Architectural Mashups
from the cut-and-paste dept
Although China is often glibly dismissed as little more than an imitator of others, yet another story about copying paradoxically shows it leading the way. That's because what's being cloned is an entire building complex that's still under construction:
The project being pirated is the Wangjing SOHO, a complex of three towers that resemble curved sails, sculpted in stone and etched with wave-like aluminum bands, that appear to swim across the surface of the Earth when viewed from the air.
As the article in Der Spiegel quoted above notes, this isn't the first time that buildings have been copied by Chinese architects:
Zhang Xin, the billionaire property developer who heads SOHO China and commissioned [the famous architect Zaha] Hadid to design the complex, lashed out against the pirates during the Galaxy opening: "Even as we build one of Zaha's projects, it is being replicated in Chongqing," a megacity near the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. At this point in time, she added, the pirates of Chongqing are building faster than SOHO. The original is set for completion in 2014.Last year, citizens of the Austrian hillside hamlet of Hallstatt were shocked when they inadvertently discovered Chinese architects had surreptitiously and extensively photographed their homes and were building a doppelgänger version of the UNESCO World Heritage site in southern China.
But here, as with the latest case, it's hard to see what the problem is. Nobody is mistaking these pirated versions for the originals: the use of photographs in the case of Hallstatt, and "digital files or renderings" in the case of the Wangjing SOHO, means that the results will only be approximate copies, lacking many key details that make the originals artistically notable. If anything, their existence will encourage visitors to seek out the real thing to find out what inspired this massive effort. After all, if somebody goes to the trouble of constructing copies of entire buildings in this way, they must think pretty highly of the original.
What's significant here is that this building piracy can be seen as part of a new trend -- the rise of a high-speed cut-and-paste approach to urban design based around architectural mashups:
Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who designed Beijing's surreal, next-generation CCTV tower, has stated the super-speed expansion of Chinese cities is producing architects who use laptops to quickly cut and paste buildings into existence. Koolhaas, in the book "Mutations," calls these architects Photoshop designers: "Photoshop allows us to make collages of photographs -- (and) this is the essence of (China's) architectural and urban production…. Design today becomes as easy as Photoshop, even on the scale of a city."
Fortunately, the architect of the cloned Wangjing SOHO seems to agree:
Zaha Hadid said she has a philosophical stance on the replication of her designs: If future generations of these cloned buildings display innovative mutations, "that could be quite exciting."
Not only that: these pirate mutations will boost her already-considerable reputation in China yet further, and enrich her artistic legacy.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: architecture, buildings, china, copies, culture, hallstatt, zhang xin
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Now if only
Still, good on Zaha Hadid.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
Wait for 3d printing to ramp up even more and we'll see a whole lot more of the better designs of the world being copied and remixed and improved.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
LoL
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
For shame!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Buildings and Culture
First it started out as people stealing loot from ships, then something about copying DVDs, Games, etc on the Internet, and now having a copied building. Making a copied building makes you a Pirate now, because the other building was "stolen". Makes scientific sense right?
Yet, we all did this before, it's how buildings, houses, etc started in the first place somehow. Yet how the heck do you copyright a building made of nature anyway? :P
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Which is original
Would that not make the copy be original, and the original be the copy. Maybe the Chinese can stop the original from being built do to intellectual property rights. That would solve all the issues.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
China
[ link to this | view in thread ]
MPAA
- What are you in for?
- I stole a building.
- A toy or model of great value?
- Nope, an actual building. A really cool one too that looks like a groups of sails from the sky.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Same work, same pay, double the credit.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
You're right, though, this is basically about bragging rights, and therefore it doesn't really matter.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Same work, same pay, double the credit.
I saw one mall in China that had their own rendition of the Venetian in Las Vegas. Specifically, they copied the "canals in the mall" part.
They even offer boat rides in the water. I'll, however, note that the Venetian in Las Vegas had gondola-shaped boats. The Chinese mall used rubber dinghys.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Have you been to Las Vegas recently?
Now how ell engineered the copies in China are is a whole other issue...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
i've noticed this a lot, actually...
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: i've noticed this a lot, actually...
[ link to this | view in thread ]