China developer 'copies' star architect's design

[General Grievous]

China developer 'copies' star architect's design

From: AFP January 04, 2013 12:00AM

This picture shows a model of the Meiquan 22nd Century building in Chongqing on Jan 3.

ALREADY famed for fake designer bags and pirated DVDs, imitation in China may have reached new heights with a set of towers that strongly resemble ones designed by renowned architect Zaha Hadid.

A developer in the southwestern city of Chongqing is putting up buildings that share the distinctive round contours and white stripes of a 39-floor shopping and office complex conceived by the British-Iraqi designer and being built in Beijing.

The magazine China Intellectual Property noted that the "design sketch indeed shows certain similarities", and listed several buildings by the developer that resembled others elsewhere in China.

Satoshi Ohashi, project director at Zaha Hadid Architects for the Beijing complex, told Der Spiegel Online: "It is possible that the Chongqing pirates got hold of some digital files or renderings of the project."

It could rank among the more flagrant ripoffs in a country already notorious for imitating foreign products without permission - but the developer of the Chongqing project, Meiquan 22nd Century, has denied any copying.

Such accusations "do not conform with the truth" and "have had a negative impact" on the company, general manager Yao Yumao said at an earlier press conference, according to a transcript published online.

Ms Hadid was the first woman to win architecture's prestigious Pritzker prize.

Her avant-garde designs have been in high demand in China, where she has a granite and glass opera house in the southern city of Guangzhou and an arts centre under construction in Chengdu, among other projects.

China's ability to reproduce foreign products is best known for imitation luxury purses and copies of Hollywood films. But knockoffs have ranged from a three-dollar version of Kate Middleton's engagement ring to fake Apple stores and an entire Austrian village.

In 2012 a developer unveiled a recreation of the centuries-old alpine hamlet of Hallstatt, a UNESCO World Heritage site, in what the state-run news agency Xinhua called "a bold example of China's knock-off culture".

 

[General Grievous]

Renowned Architect Races Against Copycat Builders in China

By Patrick Boehler Jan. 02, 2013

JASON LEE / REUTERS

A visitor prepares to take a picture of the newly opened Galaxy Soho building, designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, in Beijing October 27, 2012.

To see a design come to fruition is surely an architect’s greatest thrill — but to see it reproduced twice must be mindboggling, especially if one of the constructions is entirely unsanctioned. This is the plight currently faced by world-renowned architect Zaha Hadid. One of her designs is being realized twice in China: as planned at a construction site in the Chinese capital of Beijing, and — completely off Hadid’s accounts — at another location in Chongqing, where copycat architects are trying to complete the very same building in a “massive, open counterfeiting operation,” and in less time than the official one.

The 500,000-square-meter (5.3 million square foot) Wangjing Soho office and retail complex takes the shape of three futuristic cones reaching 200 meters (656 feet) tall and is expected to be completed by 2014. But by then, its design may be old news: the copycat architects in the central Chinese hub of Chongqing are expected to have completed their pirated version, according to Zhang Xin, the billionaire property developer who’s funding the original, told the Der Spiegel.

“It is possible that the Chongqing pirates got hold of some digital files or renderings of the project,” Satoshi Ohashi, project director for the Soho complex told the German weekly. Hadid said it could be “exciting” to see cloned copies of her projects with mutations.

The London-based Hadid was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize in 2004, the Pulitzer Prize for architects and is a much-celebrated architect in China, with 11 projects across the country. 15,000 people attended the opening of her Galaxy Soho, a similarly shaped project, in Beijing last autumn.

Though this instance of overt, blatant counterfeiting is strangely nothing new in China. A year ago, a Chinese property developer copied an entire Austrian village. Wuxi, a manufacturing hub in Eastern China, has four buildings resembling the White House. And air-conditioning tycoon Zhang Yue took the copycat phenomenon a step beyond, borrowing from across the world when he built himself a palace designed as a combination between London’s Buckingham Palace and the French royal palace of Versailles, next to an Egyptian pyramid and a statue of former General Electric CEO Jack Welsh.

 

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