99% Invisible - 125- Duplitecture

Episode Date: July 29, 2014

The best knock-offs in the world are in China. There are plenty of fake designer handbags and Rolexes, but China’s knock-offs go way beyond fashion. There are knock-off Apple stores that look so much like the real thing, some employees … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The best knockoffs in the world are in China. Sure, designer handbags and Rolexes, but also really large-scale imitations. Like fake Apple stores that are so dead on that employees of the store think they're working in a real Apple store. But beyond just working in knockoffs, many residents of Chinese suburbs live their lives in replica cities, vennices with complete canals and replicas of the Doge's Palace, parisists with rifle towers and arc to tree alps. They're Chrysler buildings, Sydney Opera houses.

Driving through the suburbs of any city in China, you will find a plethora of fake Versailles, British developments, and California is all bumping upside by side. Just Shanghai itself has ten cities all built in the architectural style of different European countries. So it's possible to travel from Germany to Italy to London in the course of a few hours provided there's not too much traffic. Bianca Boscher is the author of the book Original Copies, architectural mimicry in contemporary China, and she coined a term for these buildings. DupliTector. DupliTector refers to this nationwide movement taking place in China whereby people are copying entire cities and towns from Europe and the United States.

Life size, or sometimes even bigger than life size. These are not theme parks, dupletector developments are actually living breathing communities, where Chinese families are raising their children, living out their lives in a place that looks like Orange County or Paris, but a smack dab in the middle of the People's Republic. These buildings are not just novelty as like the pyramid or the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas.

The biggest private property developer in China told me that two-thirds of their residential developments were being built in a European style. Nor they like American Chinatownsowns, which were established by immigrants. These are Chinese communities in American or European-style buildings, which are often designed by Chinese architects. Visiting China's copy of Paris in the outskirts of Hangzhou, I found a place that in some ways was very emblematic of Paris. You had the Eiffel Tower, you had the Sh that it is a square, but there was no new architecture.

Meaning the Chinese weren't interested in duplicating the newer buildings of Paris, just the old classic looking ones that are iconic of the city. At the same time, this is really the most brand new sparkling Paris I've ever seen. We've done all this, all the luxury, all the culture, all the people. sparkling Paris I've ever seen. Even though these are intended to be copies, it's pretty much impossible to plop a building

onto a completely new environment without modifying it a little, or a lot. Oftentimes the dupletecture is larger, or smaller than real thing, or different elements, or features might be loaded bigger than others, sometimes dupletecture gets so twisted and warped until it's a freakish caricature of the original. One of the interesting twists on this architectural movement has been the creation of mega-high rises that are built in a baroque or a neoclassical style. Picture Versailles stretched 20 floors into the air, and you'll have some idea of what's going on.

Developers can take a lot of liberties with dupletexture construction, like making the replicas work in accordance with Feng Shui. But nevertheless, a lot of these dupletexture compounds have rules that actively discourage any type of modification that they think might subvert the some lacrum. They're very, very strict rules in place to ensure that Chinese elements or foreign elements don't crop in and spoil the impression of a Paris.

And these rules have been set up to preserve the European feel of this development. For example, no hanging laundry outside, no changing the paint, no installing air conditioners, no keeping chickens in the backyard. To further create the impression of Paris, there might be a French bakery or a bestial day celebration. There might be a pub and an Irish town or a real canal network and a knockoff Venice.

As odd and uncanny as these buildings and communities can be, dupletecture is pretty impressive. These buildings go up quickly on a massive scale and they show no signs of stopping. Boscow saw new developments popping up around China all the time, but dupletecture is not exactly a new trend. They have a lot of practice doing this. In pre-modern China, you had China's Imperial rulers using copycat buildings as a way of showing off their power and establishing their authority. On the 3rd century BC, one of the rulers showed off his conquest of the rival kingdom by recreating their buildings within his own capital city.

You also had Imperial hunting parks where rulers would import flora and fauna of all kinds to recreate known landscapes within their own domain. These Imperial rulers would copy as a way of showing that they could literally move heaven and earth. They now possessed this foreign building or place it was theirs. And in keeping with that tradition, one of the most copied buildings in China is the very seat of Western power itself. The White House is generally credited as being the most copied building in China, and

is used for everything from hotels to restaurants to court houses to homes. Just like the White House has a China collection, China has a White House collection. The different Chinese White House has served different purposes, so they've morphed into various permutations. But they all have those signature columns and square portico built in the True Blue Unique-style, wholly original to the US of A. I hate to break it to everyone, but that's not a original building. The architect who built the White House based his design on this huge building in Dublin that is now the seat of the Parliament of Ireland. The Linstra House in Dublin, which in turn has elements of classical Greek and Roman architecture, and it pretty much looks like the White House, even though it's kind of grey.

This is the grey house. The founding fathers were really into dupletector as well. They were their own form of architectural plagiarists. And this is so obvious if you've ever seen the buildings that Thomas Jefferson designed. They're also covered in columns. He based the Virginia State Capitol on this ancient Roman temple, and that design in turn has gone on to influence the design of many, many state capitals around the country. Some of the greatest hits of American architecture are copies of the greatest hits of ancient Roman architecture, which are now all being copied by the Chinese. So we did it too. And North America was ruled by Europeans, so it makes sense that we would have more European-style architecture lying around.

But we still continue to build these European homages today. When Americans build MacMansions or buildings that draw from European elements, we're being inspired. When the Chinese do so, they're ripping off, they're copying, they're con artists. And I think that's unfair. We should all recognize that what we're all doing is copying some pretty old buildings

because we still find them attractive and we still think that they have symbolic significance to our everyday lives. It's easy to scoff at knockoffs of Venice, but these warped memories are the start of something new. I say this all the time. Stealing plus lack of talent equals creativity. What I mean there is that in the effort to copy something, your skills or lack of skills or your different experience, it mutates the original. So that very often, you come up with something that's completely new and completely yours.

Copying is totally underrated and mindful iteration is how good things become great things. China has actually proven quite successful at turning copies into innovation. If you look at the Shanghai movement in China, which is this name given for copies of the iPhone, of sneakers, of social networks, what you find is that oftentimes the copies actually improve on the original in certain ways. China's iPhone knockoff, which I believe is called the siphon, actually had some features that you couldn't find on Apple's phone. You had removable battery, you had multiple SIM cards,

all of these things that Apple users actually really wanted and coveted. And here you could find it in this knock-off phone. I'm personally fascinated to see how China takes its imitation and turns it into innovation. The Business. Wow! You copy me! Hey, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, was produced this week by Avery Troubleman of Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced of the offices of Arxine, a comprehensive architectural firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Speaking of our dear East Bay, yours truly was named Best Local Radio Host and the Best of the East Bay Edition of the

East Bay Express. That totally made my day. Thanks guys. The 99PI experience isn't just this episode that you're hearing, we're also fascinating on Twitter. You can follow us at RomanMarr, SamListens, KatieMingle, and Troubleman. We're also on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, SoundCloud, and Spotify too. But our home on the web is 99PI.org. Radio Tapio.