There is a story – most likely apocryphal – of a customs officer at the Hong Kong border. He stops someone crossing from mainland China, opens the suitcase and finds an array of Rolex watches. Investigating further, he opens up the watch to find the complete complex geared workings all ticking away, as expected. But unexpectedly, made from intricately carved bamboo. There’s another story (this one defiantly true) of a Chinese development themed around the image of an English village. If you see it now, its nothing remarkable – red brick, black slate roof and so on. But you should have seen it before the cladding was applied: the form of a quaint cottage, its pitched roof, eaves details, window frames and lintels all cast in insitu concrete – like a brutalist’s bad dream where the logic of one kind of construction assembling different materials, trades, skills and traditions is obliterated by a monolithic material singularity. A symbolic form of home produced by process that directly contradict its symbolism, a vernacular rooted in a specific place, time and culture made unheimlich through an entirely other form of production.
There’s a moral, in some sense, to these tales. That the act of copying is first of all really difficult. And secondly, that to produce a copy often requires immense ingenuity, and the all of that originality is then skinned with a veneer of normality that conceals the weirdness beneath.
Speaking personally, the only Rolex I would wear would be a bamboo powered one, and I’d enjoy it even more holed up in a concrete cottage. Why? Because these, despite being classified as copies, have a kind of contemporary authenticity. An authenticity that resonates with the complexity, contradiction, doubt, anxiety, confusion and ambiguities of now.
And here we find ourselves amongst the complexity of the idea of the copy, which, for architecture seems particularly difficult. There are a number of reasons.
First, that the dominant idea since Modernism’s break with the Beaux Art tradition is of a certain kind of originality, often associated with a single iconoclastic author who rejects history and reference, imagining instead the plane of production as a tabula rasa.
Second, the legal protections that exist to protect the copy. The act of designing automatically generates intellectual property rights. These rights are both cultural and economic: they are the outcome of a particular idea of authorship, and express creative activity as an economic entity and serve a specific formulation of the the act of creation within capitalist economies. This is evidenced by the patent system, mobilised during the industrial revolution and designed to stimulate innovation with the reward of a (time limited) market monopoly providing a period of unchallenged economic exploitation.
Thirdly, the condition of architecture itself that different from so many other forms of cultural production that allow (or indeed are born out of) reproducability. The medium of architecture in the form of a building is always different (say in terms of in site, environmental conditions, context, use etc). Sites – unlike pages, canvases, screens, stages and so on – are fundamentally different.
Fourthly the moral sentiment against the copy. The reputation of the copy is often characterised as a low resolution, inauthentic, debased version of the original, something from which original meaning has been drained. In contrast to the authenticity of the original the copy stands accused of pastiche and fakery.
Yet it is possible to construct arguments in favour of the copy – even of sameness. At its most primeval, we learn language through copying. As Barbara Kruger’s text applied to an image of a baby at her mother breast tells us ‘we are obliged to steal language’. She suggests that language (and with it identity, culture, behaviour and all of the other things that make us socialised humans) is voraciously – almost aggressively – aquired. This is true also of architecture, one of whose roles is to construct the shared common ground of the city. The city, it should be remembered is a synthetic construction, the sum product of human culture, or even culture as habitat. And like all culture it is produced collectively.
Architectural culture, it could be argued, is a commons, a public body of knowledge. Copying from one culture to another, from one architect to another is an act that actually manufactures architectural culture. Think of the Greeks copying the Egyptians, the Romans copying the Greeks, The Renaissance copying Antiquity. In each case the act of copying produced a radically new, totally contemporary architectural form. More recently, Modernist lifting of industrial building forms also presents a case for copying as a fertile ground for producing radical breaks. It’s not what you steal, its the way that you steal it. Architecture, one might speculate, is produced in the transmission of itself from project to project, site to site, city to city.
Historically, forms of copying have been means of establishing collective languages. Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (1570), for example, were the means that Palladianism could exist – thats to say, how a single author could become a movement. In this sense we can think of his Four Books as an invitation to copy. The book took on an explicit role in the transmission of architectural language. The act of printing – itself a means of reproduction – of publishing and transmitting became part of the way architecture is produced. Copies of Palladio’s books begat architectural copies. Palladianism is not only a formal architectural phenomenon but a new hybrid of architecture in an age of reproduction.
Of course, Palladio himself was re-making an architectural language found in antique Roman architecture. And his remaking was so radical that it produced not a copy but what one might refer to (sympathetically) as a ‘Frankenstein monster’ – and entirely new forms of life assembled from the parts of corpses.
The process of multiplication through duplication, reference, and remaking turns a unique individual exception into something more collective: A lone shriek becomes a participative conversation.
The copy is intrinsically social in its formation. It is made in reference to something that pre-existing both materially and its accrued values and meanings. The copies own physical body is an assemblage of the knowledge of the original projected into a different circumstance. Because of its engaged relationship with the world, the copy is an act of socialised creation. Yet the copy does not only reproduce, as it merges into the world it takes on its own meanings
Architectural Doppelgagners was a research cluster at the AA run by myself and Ines Weisman. Its interest was in the status of the architectural copy and a series of studies of examples explored how they performance in the world (or perhaps more accurately reperformed). Each example served to elaborate on the unexpected
The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, Yamoussoukro in the Ivory Coast, for example is – give or take a detail here and a proportion there – a replica of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome beamed down onto the flat African landscape. Presented as a ‘gift’ from President Félix Houphou?t-Boigny to Pope John Paul II, its was also part of his project to relocate the capital to the town of his birthplace. On September 10, 1990, the Pope came to Yamoussoukro to consecrate the church. Our Lady of Peace may seem just another post-colonial genuflection to European culture but perhaps this concealed
a sophisticated sleight of hand. Opposition to Houphou?t- Boigny had been organised by local Catholic Bishops. While the construction of Our Lady of Peace appeared to be a benefaction to Rome it really served to mobilise the power of the Vatican to endorse the presidents position and repress opposition. The doubling of the St Peter’s redirected the iconographic power of the original against the very thing it appeared to honour.
On 15th April, 2012 a recreation of the Austrian alpine village Hallstatt opened in Huizhou, an area of mountains and lakes in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. “Hallstatt Villa Zone” opened with two product types, Townhouse and Larry
Villa. 110 of 134 villas for sale were sold that day. While the replica was dubbed the “only genuinely Austrian town in the whole of China” others argued that it was an act of
theft, the work of “spies” who secretly prepared blueprints of European cities and villages. No permission had been sought to produce the copy and Austrian villagers and Intellectual Property lawyers alike began to debate the legality of copying of an entire village.
The original village is a major tourist attraction and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This title is bestowed because of a sites historical and cultural uniqueness. A WHS is a mechanism used to preserve those unique qualities. If Hallstatt II threatens that singularity, should UNESCO intervene? Or conversely is doubling a way of protecting its uniqueness? Copying the originality that belongs to someone else and pretending that it is your own is termed ‘passing off’ by intellectual property law. We often think of it as morally wrong, as a debased form of creativity. But the mayor of Austrian Hallstatt Alexander Scheutz looked at it differently as he proclaimed “Nothing is wrong”. Seeing
that almost 9000 Chinese tourists came to visit the ‘original’ in 2011, he declared that his village is now “proud to see there is another Austrian style town on the other side of the world.” Here the replica performs as a kind of international diplomacy.
Another example – a copy (one of many) of the the Villa Rotunda in Nablus in the Palestinian Territories. Beit Falasteen (The House of Palestine) built by Munib R
al-Masri and designed by his architecture graduate son.
Speaking to the FT, al-Masri explained that he conceived the idea as a 19 year old in the US “Back in 1953, I was working 16-hour shifts in Chicago to pay for my next semester at the University of Texas. I used to visit a dance hall called the Palladium. It was 15 cents a ticket. I was an avid dancer and I fell in love with that place. I promised myself: if I go back to Palestine, I will build something of this nature”.
But as with the many other Rotunda copies, Beit Falasteen cites the original while simultaneously re-writing its narrative. The Villa’s rooms, for example, are named “Jerusalem”, “Jaffa and Haifa”, “Bethlehem and Nazareth”, and “Nablus and Jenin”.
“This house is a small dream,” explains al-Masri. “It’s become real despite the fact it looked impossible at times. But the real dream is creating a free, independent Palestinian state. If we had not built the house here, there would likely be a Jewish settlement in its place.”
These architectural doppelgängers suggest that the copy though (or more precisely because) it acknowledges the past and refers to shared languages produces radically different bodies. It provides trajectories that escape the either/or dogmas originality and pastiche. This form of copy rewires fixed cultural arguments over authenticity in alternative ways, unlocking new possibilities for architecture by re-using the past with imagination.
These are examples that show the potential of the copy to operate within – or with reference to – the world around us. Not as the Modernist dream of the tabula rasa nor as the reconstruction of a nostalgic past that never existed.
The copy (a good copy that is) has a heightened interest in the world around us. Its very existence depends upon its relationship to the world (and the thing that it is replicating). This awareness of the material and cultural qualities of the subject means that the copy is already in productive dialogue with its contexts. And like the bamboo Rolex (or the shuttering required to pour a concrete cottage), the technical production of a copy requires ingenuity and precision of one kind or another. These, in a roundabout way, are means of engaging with core disciplinary issues of both context and tectonics. It’s precisely that long journey though – routed through wide maps of culture – that can make the copy so powerful.
It is this conceptual ingenuity and dexterity that the act of copying provides. The etymological root of the word copy is cornucopia, from its Latin root cornu copiae in turn derived from the mythical horn of the goat Amalthea that nurtured the infant Zeus. The copy considered in this way is a form of bounces plenty, endless nourishing goodness. Not a static object but a flow.
If we recognise the copy as a central part of the production of culture, the mechanisms of architectural production and even as an intrinsic quality of the city itself we would perhaps release ourselves into that cornucopic state. If we recognise the ways in which repetition and replication provide us not only with pre-existing solutions and models but also as a way to express difference, even novelty. Overthrowing the tyranny of originality in its simplistic formal sense could mean redirecting all that energy and effort into other forms of innovation. Reimagining (and decriminalising) the act of copying could also reconfigure the production – and consumption – of the city as a collective and shared project.
First published in Rewriting Architecture 10+1 Actions: Tabula Scripta