Techdirt. Stories filed under "buildings"

Pirated Buildings In China And The Rise Of Architectural Mashups

Glyn Moody — Tue, 8 Jan 2013 20:03:00 PST

Although China is often glibly dismissed as little more than an imitator of others, yet another story about copying paradoxically shows it leading the way. That's because what's being cloned is an entire building complex that's still under construction:

The project being pirated is the Wangjing SOHO, a complex of three towers that resemble curved sails, sculpted in stone and etched with wave-like aluminum bands, that appear to swim across the surface of the Earth when viewed from the air.

Zhang Xin, the billionaire property developer who heads SOHO China and commissioned [the famous architect Zaha] Hadid to design the complex, lashed out against the pirates during the Galaxy opening: "Even as we build one of Zaha's projects, it is being replicated in Chongqing," a megacity near the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. At this point in time, she added, the pirates of Chongqing are building faster than SOHO. The original is set for completion in 2014.

As the article in Der Spiegel quoted above notes, this isn't the first time that buildings have been copied by Chinese architects: Last year, citizens of the Austrian hillside hamlet of Hallstatt were shocked when they inadvertently discovered Chinese architects had surreptitiously and extensively photographed their homes and were building a doppelgänger version of the UNESCO World Heritage site in southern China.
But here, as with the latest case, it's hard to see what the problem is. Nobody is mistaking these pirated versions for the originals: the use of photographs in the case of Hallstatt, and "digital files or renderings" in the case of the Wangjing SOHO, means that the results will only be approximate copies, lacking many key details that make the originals artistically notable. If anything, their existence will encourage visitors to seek out the real thing to find out what inspired this massive effort. After all, if somebody goes to the trouble of constructing copies of entire buildings in this way, they must think pretty highly of the original.

What's significant here is that this building piracy can be seen as part of a new trend -- the rise of a high-speed cut-and-paste approach to urban design based around architectural mashups:

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who designed Beijing's surreal, next-generation CCTV tower, has stated the super-speed expansion of Chinese cities is producing architects who use laptops to quickly cut and paste buildings into existence. Koolhaas, in the book "Mutations," calls these architects Photoshop designers: "Photoshop allows us to make collages of photographs -- (and) this is the essence of (China's) architectural and urban production…. Design today becomes as easy as Photoshop, even on the scale of a city."

Fortunately, the architect of the cloned Wangjing SOHO seems to agree: Zaha Hadid said she has a philosophical stance on the replication of her designs: If future generations of these cloned buildings display innovative mutations, "that could be quite exciting."
Not only that: these pirate mutations will boost her already-considerable reputation in China yet further, and enrich her artistic legacy.

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DailyDirt: Really Tall Buildings in China

Michael Ho — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 17:00:00 PDT

Although China has been historically known for building lengthy walls that last for centuries, the country is now constructing skyscrapers at an incredible pace. It might seem logical that a country with a huge population would need to start building vertically, instead of horizontally, but these huge buildings have some unimpressive occupancy rates so far. Here are just a few interesting links on big buildings in mainland China.

A 74-story building in China isn't finished yet, but the locals are already complaining that the huge archway looks unflatteringly like a pair of giant pants. The British-designed skyscraper was supposed to be the largest gate-shaped structure -- representing a "Gate to the East", but Chinese bloggers have nicknamed the building "Giant Underpants" instead of "Arc de Triomphe of the East". [url]
Buildings more than 152 meters tall can be considered skyscrapers, and four of the ten tallest buildings are located in China. There are now hundreds of skyscrapers in China, outnumbering those in the US, but there are concerns about how sustainable these towers will be with low occupancy rates and questionable safety and building management. [url]
The Sky City project is expected to be complete in January 2013, taking the title for the world's tallest building away from the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The more impressive feat, however, is that this building will be fully constructed in just a few months. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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German Photographer Plans To Add Back In Buildings That Opt-Out Of Google Street View

Mike Masnick — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:11:41 PDT

We've never quite understood the general fears about Google Street View's photographs, since they're photographs of public places. However, many still seem somewhat freaked out by it all, and especially in Europe, they've continually put new rules and restrictions on Google's Street View operation. Apparently, in Germany, people can specifically request that Google remove images of certain buildings. Of course, this is silly, and to prove that point, a German photographer is going to go photograph all of those buildings that have been excluded, then upload them to Google's Picasa image hosting service, link them up to their GPS coordinates, and then "re-connect" them with Google Maps.

He's basically doing a good job of pointing out how incredibly silly it is to say that you can't photograph something that's in public view. Anyone can photograph it, and with today's technology, those photographs will likely end up online. Pretending that opting out of Google's Street View protects any sort of privacy is folly, so congrats to Jens Best, for coming up with a simple and effective way of showing that.

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