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Jan 04, 2013

» Chinese copycat architects pirating design of a building while it's being built

It seems Chinese copycat architects are pirating the design of Zaha Hadid’s latest project, the Wangjing SOHO, as the building comes to fruition. This isn’t the first time pirates have copied architectural plans on a massive scale — it’s just that now it’s happening in real time.

One of the major ways to tell whether something is a remix or a ripoff is whether the thief has transformed the stolen material into something new. One of the ways this transformation can happen is by simply appropriating material from one context and tweaking it just enough to make it work in another.

But when you consider how Hadid feels about context, things get a little interesting:

I don’t really believe in relating to the environment, per se. [It can be hard] to start afresh with something new if you’re always constantly relating to context. And I think what’s happened in the last, let’s say, twenty or thirty years is the whole idea of context has changed a lot.

Some would say this is exactly the trouble with architecture today: architects design buildings regardless of their context, in the hopes of making “something new,” something less like design and more like art. In some ways, it seems fitting that Hadid is having her design ripped off—if one designs without “relating to context,” then it makes sense that the design could be lifted and plopped right down in another context without any transformation.