The Indicator: Architecture and Crime

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© Did Zaha copy herself? Courtesy, ZHA

From the recent information overload concerning Zaha Hadid’s Wangjing Soho being pirated in China, one might think that copying was a new phenomenon in architecture. Is this really that shocking or even worth mentioning? 

It must be because, for the next few hundred words or so, I’m going to be mentioning it quite a bit. Copying can be a complicated issue. In Western culture, in particular, the status of the copy is fraught with contradictions. It is a problem that has existed since long before Walter Benjamin wrote about it in “The Work of Art in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction”. 

This “scandal” is a stand-in for the West’s on-going battle against gratuitous Chinese piracy, as if this is uniquely a problem with doing business in China. This singular act of copying has become an issue partly because it is Zaha being copied and in part because it is tropical to define China as the world’s piracy factory. While designers in the West “emulate”, “imitate”, and “borrow” our Chinese colleagues are pirates. Argh. 

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Cite: Sebastian Jordana. "The Indicator: Architecture and Crime" 24 Jan 2013. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/323161/the-indicator-architecture-and-crime> ISSN 0719-8884

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