Un/Fair Use, up at the Center for Architecture in New York City until January 2, 2016

[The] appropriation in architecture is not new, nor is it always bad. “Forms of copying, parodying, and critiquing are at the center of the discipline; they are as important to the discipline as novelty,” says Ana Miljački, a professor of architecture at MIT. Along with Sarah Hirschman, a designer and UC Berkeley Department of Architecture lecturer, Miljački has curated an exhibit that seeks to draw a better line between permissible and plagiaristic types of architectural copycatting. “What I find problematic as a teacher is that the definition provided by law… separates use and usefulness,” Miljački says. “We teach that use and expression are fused together. If you were to design by copyright law, it would produce a strange object.” Because the law separates utility from invention, teaching according to it “could easily lead to a kind of status quo base and an appliqué of stylistic expression.” Unique architectural forms—ones that are both functional and artistic—would be harder to produce.

This model ,... shows a building at the center of Sturdza v the United Arab Emirates. Architect Elena Sturdza designed this building for the UAE Embassy. Later, the UAE ceased communication with her and brought on another architect
This model ,... shows a building at the center of Sturdza v the United Arab Emirates. Architect Elena Sturdza designed this building for the UAE Embassy. Later, the UAE ceased communication with her and brought on another architect - This model, on the other hand, shows a building at the center of Sturdza v the United Arab Emirates. Architect Elena Sturdza designed this building for the UAE Embassy. Later, the UAE ceased communication with her and brought on another architect, whose renderings bore a similarity to Sturdza's. Ultimately the case boiled down to whether Sturdza was licensed to practice in the UAE. © ELISABETH BERNSTEIN

Un/Fair Use, up at the Center for Architecture in New York City until January 2, 2016, is presented in two halves. On one side of the exhibit you have what Hirschman and Miljački are calling “fair use moves,” all represented by 3-D models. These are “tropes or idioms you can work within, employ, use yourself,” Miljački says. Like housing styles or typologies, these cannot be copyright protected.

On the other side you have “unfair moves,” presented through an abridged history of architectural case studies in copyright infringement. Copyright itself is old; the government passed the U.S. Copyright Act in 1790 to protect authors of maps, charts, and books from intellectual poaching.

Architecture, however, didn’t get similar acknowledgement until 1990 when Congress passed the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act. This area of the law hasn’t had itsBrown v Board of Education moment—there has not yet been a watershed case that’s propelled significant change in one direction or another. Rather, each case has built incrementally on the last, by providing new, more specific insights.

Architectural copyright is difficult because the buildings (or renderings) in question have to go through tests to determine substantial similarity. “There’s the ‘total look and feel’ test, where you have an ordinary person like a juror look at the two works side by side, and say, ‘do these things look substantially similar?’” says Jeffrey Reichard, who practices construction and copyright law in Greensboro, S.C. “The other is the abstraction, filtration, comparison test where you basically look at only the protectable elements of a design.” This results in what Reichard says is a thin copyright protection.