A movement is growing against cultural appropriation, but could it spell the end for historical references in architecture?

Compared to other art forms, architecture gets an easy ride in the court of public opinion. Filmmakers, pop musicians and fashion designers know, one ill-judged move and they'll be hung out to dry by a swarm of social media warriors. Their reputation will be demolished in a tornado of online outrage. Condemnatory articles will follow in national newspapers. Managers and agents will hastily assemble apologetic press statements. Careers can falter, even derail. Public sensitivity, and the price of a miscalculation are high.

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Architects, however, have little to fear from the Twitterati. Some high-profile news stories drag designers into the melee of public scorn, but generally we can sleep easy knowing that our work will never be exposed to the same forensic cross-examination that each frame of Taylor Swift's next music video will be. Yet this could be about to change.

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James Anaya, dean of law at the University of Colorado is leading a coalition lobbying the UN to expand international intellectual property regulations. His proposals would restrict the use of cultural items, including designs, dances and words associated with certain ethnic groups.

Anaya's work is part of a growing movement against cultural appropriation – the adoption of elements from another culture. Google searches for the term have risen approximately 10,000 per cent since 2010, as incidents that might have seemed trivial a few years ago are now taken very seriously.

Fashion designer Tory Burch angered thousands in June when she marketed a newly launched coat as African-inspired, when its design was actually derived from Romanian garments. The Navajo nation sued retailed Urban Outfitters in 2012, after the company launched a line of products using the tribe's name. Author Anthony Horowitz was told by his editor it would be inappropriate for him as a white writer to include a black lead character in a forthcoming novel. Beyonce has been criticised for wearing a sariBieber for wearing dreadlocks.

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The old theory that idealised buildings could be stripped of contextual cultural symbolism and mass produced for any climate or society, which underpinned the 1930s International Style and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, is now thoroughly discredited. Architects who build without adopting some concessions to local urban character are cast as anti-civic, disrespectful and even neocolonial.

Weirdly our architectural consensus is now the polar opposite of what is making headlines in other artistic disciplines. Where filmmakers, painters and writers are increasingly expected to avoid creating work which takes material from outside their own heritage, in architecture we celebrate designers who reach far beyond their cultural bubble.

It is generally said that architecture lags years behind wider trends. If this is true, we may start to see a growing movement calling out historical references in architecture, as the public become aware of the sheer volume of cultural appropriation that encrusts every street.

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