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Tadao Ando accused of copying artist Willie Cole's designs with recycled Met Gala chandelier

2023-05-03T11:16:00-04:00

Last night, a star-studded crowd trickled into the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its annual gala beneath a gargantuan chandelier made of what appeared to be plastic water bottles. After the event took place, several members of the art community noticed what appeared to be suspicious similarities between the chandelier and the plastic works of American artist Willie Cole.

Cole’s work is included in the museum’s permanent collection, and the large-scale chandeliers in question were profiled just two months ago by the New York Times. The large-scale pieces were made of nearly 6,000 individual water bottles and were created to instigate a conversation about the water crisis afflicting Cole’s hometown of Newark, New Jersey, in 2019. Some have found them comparable on social media.

The pieces were also profiled in Vogue yesterday, which quoted event planner Raul Àvila as saying: "We wanted to find a way to create a sustainable design that would implement the bottles into a breathtaking installation unlike anything we’ve done before."

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Willie cole (@williecoleart)

No more Duplitecture: China cracks down on copycat architecture and supertall skyscrapers

2020-05-15T18:13:00-04:00

A government statement says "plagiarising, imitating, and copycatting" designs is prohibited in new public facilities. The statement says buildings "reveal a city's culture" - and that "large, foreign, and weird" designs should be limited. The guidelines also clamp down on new skyscrapers - limiting them, in general, to a maximum of 500 metres.

A new government directive released jointly by China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and National Development and Reform Commission seeks to halt the further spread of Western-inspired copycat architecture, a common appearance in many Chinese cities.

Duplitecture definition from Archinect's Lexicon

Construction of new tall buildings, especially skyscrapers over 500 meters, will also be significantly limited.

The announcement follows a prominent 2016 directive that hoped to ban "oversized, xenocentric, weird" architecture and President Xi Jinping’s criticism of "weird architecture" in 2014.

Previously:

Winning airport design accused of plagiarizing Kengo Kuma's Wooden Bridge Museum

2018-08-27T14:09:00-04:00

Duangrit Bunnag, the renowned local architect who won the bid to design Suvarnabhumi airport's second terminal, has denied plagiarising the work of a Japanese architect. "I didn't copy anyone else's work. Those who follow my work will know that I created a similar image in my previous designs, such as for a hotel in Sri Lanka," Mr Duangrit told The Standard, a local online news portal.

Duangrit Bunnag's firm DBALP Consortium, along with Nikken Sekkei, EMS Consultants, MHPM, MSE and ARJ Consortium, were recently announced as winners of the Suvarnabhumi Airport Terminal 2 Project design contest. Focused on expanding the Thailand airport, the competition design sparked online accusations of plagiarizing Kengo Kuma's Wooden Bridge Museum in southern Japan.

DBALP Consortium's winning airport design:

Suvarnabhumi Terminal 2 competition entry by DBALP Consortium. Image: DBALP Consortium.

Kengo Kuma's Wooden Bridge Museum:

Kengo Kuma's Wooden Bridge Museum, located in southern Japan. Image: Takumi Ota.

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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Zaera-Polo responds to alleged Wikipedia plagiarism in Biennale texts

2015-03-17T14:16:00-04:00

Explaining his move, he said that, while it was ‘unorthodox in an academic setting’, the citations were removed to give the publication more relevance to the general public and less of an academic tone. [...] In a letter to Princeton University, Koolhaas defended Zaera-Polo, saying that the publication was intended as a ‘polemic, not an academic document’.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo resigned from his deanship at Princeton University's School of Architecture back in October, amidst rumors of plagiarism in texts supplied to Rem Koolhaas' 2014 Venice Biennale. Now, in a letter published on his website, Zaera-Polo clarifies the rumors, and addresses the precise incidents of alleged plagiarism. His position, one supported by Rem Koolhaas, maintains that as the Biennale's texts were intended to be "polemic", "non-academic" and "speculative", they did not require the same academic citation standards that a university like Princeton would require.

See the full text of Zaera-Polo's statement below, titled "A Clarifying Statement", courtesy of architectsjournal.co.uk:

To whom it may concern:

I am making the following statement in order to finally clarify the reasons for my sudden resignation from the Post of Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University on October 30 2014. This is now imperative not just in respect to the rumors spread on t...

Wilkinson Eyre Architects accuse Italians of plagiarism over tree design

2014-12-08T11:50:00-05:00

“I think it’s definitely derivative of the Gardens by the Bay concept,” Chris Wilkinson, one of the British architects responsible for the “super-trees” in Singapore’s Marina Bay, told The Daily Telegraph. “You’d have expected them to have come up with something a bit more original.”

"Super Trees", Singapore, designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects

Can Graffiti Be Copyrighted?

2014-09-22T14:05:00-04:00

In July, Anasagasti hired a lawyer and filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit, accusing American Eagle of stealing his work and seeking monetary damages. If it sounds novel to apply copyright to graffiti art, that’s because it is: Lawyers who work in this area say it’s not clear anyone has ever tried this in court. Copyright law, as its name suggests, lays out the rules for when it’s okay to copy something. But does it extend to art that's on public walls?

Chinese Colleges Are Trying to Look Like the Ivy League

2014-09-16T17:57:00-04:00

[...] colleges in China are copying America’s copycat approach. There’s a university in Shanghai where faux English manor houses sit side-by-side with dorms modeled on Britain’s half-timbered homes. To the north, Hebei province boasts a university inspired by Harry Potter’s Hogwarts—itself fashioned on the traditional collegiate Gothic. Even specific colleges have been cloned.

China Has a Fake Paris, and It’s a Ghost Town

2013-08-05T18:35:00-04:00

That’s a nice photo of Paris, isn’t it? Nope! That’s not Paris and no, it’s not Disney World or even the Las Vegas Strip; it’s a replica Paris in China. What makes this clone of Paris even more weird is that it’s a ghost town. Only about 2,000 people live there, which means that those giant skyscrapers, with 700+ units tend to only have around 30 people living in each of them. This city has become a place to take wedding photos for Chinese citizens who can’t afford to travel to the real Paris...

Plans to recreate the Crystal Palace are as jingoistic as a Gove history lesson

2013-07-30T05:05:00-04:00

Chinese cities have recently become notorious for their sheer degree of copying and reproduction, with hundreds of replicas of famous historic buildings and even of recent ones – such as the copy of Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House, under construction almost immediately after the original was completed. But in London, the Crystal Palace replica is only the most vast – and probably the least likely – of a smaller but still significant series of proposed reconstructions.

Why Is China Stealing Cities, Towns, and Buildings?

2013-05-20T17:37:00-04:00

A lot of Chinese people look up to the West as an ideal, so the construction of these towns could be seen as a way of accelerating their progress; a quick way of achieving through emulation.

NPR talks to McGill professor about China's architectural knock-off of Zaha's Wangjing Soho

2013-01-04T13:07:00-05:00

China is also the land of the knock-off: knock-off designer handbags, knock-off blockbuster movies on DVDs, etc. But now, it seems the knock-off has gone off the charts in terms of proportion: entire buildings.

As we have previously mentioned, Zaha Hadid is the latest victim of piracy in China, with a upcoming copy of her Wangjing Soho complex... scheduled to be completed before the original. NPR explores this issue with McGill architecture prof Avi Friedman.

Zaha Hadid vs. didaH ahaZ

2012-12-29T00:47:00-05:00

Star architect Zaha Hadid is currently building several projects across China. One of them, however, is being constructed twice. Pirates are the process of copying one of her provocative designs, and the race is on to see who can finish first.

Does she have anything to say to thousands of architecture students who copy her designs every semester?

Shanghai Satellite Scam

2012-09-11T12:27:00-04:00

Recently MovingCities went scanning the thematically and sketchy styled satellite towns [a Dutch, Nordic, Italian, Spanish, British, German, Canadian and even Chinese one] dotting the periphery of Shanghai. The text, published earlier in Bauwelt, can now be read online. A few extracts:

Where in western cultures signs of historicism – Las Vegas, Disneyland, Amsterdam – are support by ideas of ideology, tourism or preservation, in developing, or even redeveloping, cultures similar signs of historicism are oftentimes understood from economical, real-estate or consumer perspectives.

The first thing one notices upon entering these guarded territories, is how small they are. Yes, they are walkable and varied in form, street section and amount of public space. They are definitely no districts, almost not even towns, and even in the case of Holland Village just a square and a street. They are stretches of land, tucked away in-between other real-estate development.

Nordic Town is alr...

Chinese secretly copy Austrian town

2012-06-07T13:13:00-04:00

The original is a centuries-old village of 900 and a UNESCO heritage site that survives on tourism. The copycat is a housing estate that thrives on China's new rich. In a China famous for pirated products, the replica Hallstatt sets a new standard.

Previously: Xeroxed Village(s)?

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.