Original Copies

On InHabitat recently a blond lady interviewed Bianca Bosker about her book Original Copies. I really enjoyed this because it makes some interesting comments about Chinese culture.



In the book she sets out to understand why this duplitecture is happening. While almost the whole of the rest of the world scoffs at projects like Thames Town and the One City Nine Towns project in Shanghai, (some) people are moving there and living there very happily, she wanted to write a book about why this is happening.

Setting aside the issues of the ones that are ghost towns due to location or clashing too much with fung shui, these insanely unsustainable places are an illustration of how a copy of something is admired in a very different way in China than in the rest of the world. In this part of the world, as Bosker points out, mimicry is mastery. A massive testament to the countries success and affluence is being placed right there at the center of cities and towns. A physical monumental prowess that the rest of the world doesn't really seem to get, although it happens all over the world at some point in history.

While I gut agrees with most of the critics that this is quite silly, I remind myself of the monuments at home. The Cenotaph, anyone? Arc de Triomphe? How many countless replicas of Roman villa's or Greek temples has every single European person stepped inside in their life time? The architecture that our boys Palladio and co where copying was displaced in time, yes, so far back in history they made half of it up but that doesn't detract from the fact that they where showing the prowess of the renaissance mind by making original copies of a society they aspired to be, or at very least admired the aesthetics of.

That's exactly what's happening here, parts of admired architecture is being replicated, it's just so much close to recent history it makes people feel weird. Or maybe people at the time felt weird about the renaissance but that part of history is lost.

I think I'd like this subject to be my first book. If I just set out to write a best seller it'll work, right?