Wangjing Soho; Image: Zaha Hadid Architects

Architecture is no stranger to copying. In fact, it was long accepted part of the profession. Now, of course, we don’t build with Corinthian columns anymore—right?—and the rules of making architecture have changed, or so it would seem. In fact, copying still continues and there exists little precise litigation to prevent architectural piracy en masse. In China, for instance, both architecture firms and their buildings, along with full-scale Apple stores and Austrian lake towns, are frequently copied and sold as quasi-legitimate products. Zaha Hadid, perhaps the world’s most famous architect, now knows this first hand.

According to a de Spiegel report, ZHA’s design for Wangjing SOHO, currently under construction and just one of 11 projects the firm is working on for China, is being copied in the eastern city of Chongqing. The pirate architects, who remain anonymous (duh), are hard at work on the counterfeit, which it seems is rising even faster than ZHA’s original in Beijing. Click through for a comparison of the design and its fake.

Wangjing Soho; Image: Zaha Hadid Architects

The half-million-square-feet Wangjing SOHO complex, which is being built by the same developer responsible for the Galaxy SOHO, is scheduled to open in 2014. The scheme consists of three curved volumes that look like sails and are joined together at angles. The clone, or “FauxHO” replicates the blob-like forms, though reduces the trio of towers to just two. The fake is situated on a plot of land that’s similar to the Beijing site, with major traffic arteries encircling the campus and isolating it from the adjacent urban fabric.

Wangjing “FauxHO”; Image via de Spiegel

Satoshi Ohashi, the ZHA project director overseeing Wangjing SOHO, told de Spiegel that the counterfeiters may have gotten their hands on digital files containing the firm’s original plans. He seems less concerned with the copy’s verisimilitude than with the speed that it is being built, which is overcoming ZHA’s progress in Beijing. Who will win the race to the finish line?

by Architizer Editors

posted in Uncategorized

tagged architectural pirates, beijing, Chongqing, clone, Galaxy SOHO, piracy, wangjing soho, zaha hadid

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