As a current exhibition at New York’s Center for Architecture points out, rather than specifying approaches to reproducing earlier forms, today’s more instrumental decrees on copying in architecture operate on a seemingly opposite impulse: that of protecting architecture from the copy, a concept now seen as antithetical to innovation and progress. Curated by MIT professor Ana Miljacki and designer Sarah Hirschman, Un/Fair Use investigates how recent discourse about architecture and copyright law reveal a deeper imperative to revisit the very definition of architecture. Though it may appear we’ve come a long way from the Renaissance, we may still be asking the same questions.
The exhibition is split into two parts: a series of five filmed interviews with protagonists involved in architecture’s 1990 integration into US copyright law and an orderly display of unlabeled 3D-printed models. On one side of the gallery, the parade of models, all rendered in a similar scale, represents what Miljacki calls “fair use moves.” These are architectural forms discernible in at least three extant architectural designs. As the exhibition and its accompanying pamphlet suggest, these formal expressions — boxes, blobs, twists, and folds, among other familiar permutations — have achieved a level of ubiquity that defies the copyright, making up a public commons of architectural forms.
On the opposite wall: the problem children. Here are the “unfair use moves,” pairs of originals and their illegitimate copies made famous, in some respects, by legal skirmishes. Twinned, miniature mansions invoke the 1988 case of Demetriades v. Kaufmann, which went to court after a suburban couple reverse-engineered a developer-built house to create blueprints for their own residence. However roundabout, the pilfered plans were ruled as unlawful copies, and the couple had to commission new designs to complete their half-built, derivative dream home. In the more publicized 2005 case of Shine v. Childs, an early scheme for the Freedom Tower was denounced as a copy of a project conceived by Yale architecture student Thomas Shine. Shine had evidently showcased the torqued structure and textured curtain wall of his “Olympic Tower” before a jury that included Freedom Tower architect David Childs, and even though the Olympic Tower was never destined for construction, its design was successfully registered for a copyright in 2004, prompting Childs and his powerhouse firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to abandon their scheme with a similarly twisted and diamond-patterned façade.
Cases such as these reveal, for one, the elusiveness of the architectural work, which clearly extends beyond buildings to the two- and three-dimensional objects that represent them. This is one of the main narratives running through Un/Fair Use: that of determining which media can transmit architectural information, and what constitutes the fair or unfair use of the information being mediated. In her interview for the exhibition, legal scholar Jane C. Ginsburg emphasized the need to keep the legal definition of the architectural work broad enough to withstand changes in practice. She and others foresaw the emergence of new means of representing architectural works, and so they persuaded legislators to define the work of architecture as “the design of a building as embodied in any tangible medium or expression, including a building, architectural plans or drawings.”
