Archinect - News

China's extreme "duplitecture" photographed next to its Paris equivalent

2018-01-11T18:02:00-05:00

Photographer Francois Prost's recent photo series, Paris Syndrome, reveals just how far China's "duplitecture" went in the city of Tianducheng. Pairing images of China's replica city with its Paris equivalent—side by side it can be initially unclear which is the original.

Tianducheng features its own 100m high Eiffel tower, a haussmanian style neighborhood and a Versailles garden inspired park. The Paris copy was built 11 years ago and deemed a ghost town until just last year when the population rose to 30,000. Now Tianducheng is in many ways just another suburb with middle class people going about their daily lives.

Have you spotted which is the real Paris? All images on the left are of Tianducheng and all on the right are of Paris.

This duplitecture goes way further than simply copying a famous structure as an attraction; this is an entire city designed to have real people live in it. Dig further into the oddities and ideas around this phenomena in CityLab's article.

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Did SOM rip off this architect's designs for One World Trade Center?

2017-06-15T12:27:00-04:00

A Korean-born architect on Wednesday sued a major architecture firm over the design of Manhattan's One World Trade Center, claiming that the building bears a "striking similarity" to a tower he designed in 1999 while in graduate school. Jeehoon Park accused Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of falsely claiming design credit for the 104-story One World Trade Center, whose 1,776-foot (541 m) height including the spire makes it the Western Hemisphere's tallest building.

Park is president of Qube Architecture, a Georgia-based practice. His design, shown below, was made when he was getting a masters from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Park is seeking unspecified damages.

According to the architect, Skidmore has access to the design through an associate partner—one of Park's thesis advisors.

Park's design on the left, One World Trade Center on the right

Pentagon Replica Built in Shanghai

2016-01-08T12:45:00-05:00

Earlier this week, drone footage capturing a shanzhai Pentagon in suburban Shanghai went viral. The knock-off replica building, which is shaped just like the real headquarters of the US Military in Washington DC, is a massive a shopping center in Nanxiang Town out in Shanghai's Jiading District.

Should architecture strive for originality? Can it ever achieve it?

2015-11-23T20:03:00-05:00

...the [Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act] is a [comparatively] recent development. Architecture shares certain myths with art that influence its commercial value, such as that of the singular author and singular work, but these are also relatively recent: Renaissance architects believed the peak of civilisation existed in antiquity, and so imitated ancient ruins. The commercial and social value of “new” and “novel” and even “original” are, arguably, products of modernity.

Copying is good for design

2012-02-06T13:59:29-05:00

In pre-industrial days, copying used to be a positive act. It was seen as a skill. Artists were looked upon as handworkers. Copying became a negative notion with the cult of the individual artist and the arrival of mass production, which made replication extremely cheap and easy. Copyright and intellectual property laws were created to protect the original. In those days, the amount of new products reaching the market was relatively small.