These questions are even trickier in architecture—or painting, or sculpture, for that matter—than on the written page. A paragraph in a biography of George Washington, for example, that reads the same word for word as a paragraph from a previous biography of the first president is solid evidence of theft. But if a building has a torqued (that is, corkscrew-like) façade and thus bears a passing resemblance to an older, similarly torqued design, is that also solid evidence? On the one hand, you could say yes, and make the case that because the torque is so integral that it defines the building, it is therefore even more egregious to copy such an important element than to lift a single paragraph from a book.
But most people would go the other way, because architecture is fundamentally different from writing. A book’s value is decided in large part by the accumulated impressions gained from reading it; therefore, if part of the book was written by someone else, its author has rigged the reader’s appreciation of their work. But architectural appreciation works differently, more holistically. The vast majority of people, inside and out of the profession, judge a building by the sum of its parts to the near exclusion of its individual elements. What is important is not so much the torque, but how the torque works with, say, the building’s base or crown. To be sure, the difference isn’t completely distinct—a book’s worth is obviously determined in part by how well all its arguments and characters and whatnot go together, and an otherwise well-done building can be marred by a particular element, such as a poorly executed entrance. But by and large, we look at the two in fundamentally different ways.
Such issues are increasingly important for a couple of key reasons. First, "creativity" (in my view at least) is being redefined so that it focuses on the manipulation--connection, juxtaposition, filtering, arrangement--as much as on unique production of artifacts from the solitary mind of a genius. Second, plagiarism for most people has historically been defined in terms of written, verbal texts. But today people are not simply writing texts, but designing things, and design involves a different set of ground rules. In text production, quotations are marked literally with quotation marks and explicit citations. There aren't quote marks in design.
Posted by johndanseven at September 5, 2005 03:25 PM