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British architects at the mercy of China’s copycats

Established UK firms are now facing a novel challenge: Chinese doppelgangers bidding for contracts in their names

by Jonathan Glancey (via guardian.co.uk)
Tuesday 30 November 2010 17.53 GMT

All art, Piccasso once said, is copying. The same might sometimes be said about architecture. A decade or so ago, I was on a bus heading north from Shenzen to Guangzhou in southern China when, half asleep, I looked out of the steamed-up windows and saw what seemed to be the Palace of Westminster. I asked the bus driver to stop, which he kindly did. I rubbed my eyes. It was a block of newly built concrete flats tricked up to look like Barry and Pugin’s neo-Gothic masterpiece, complete with clock tower. What I found out later, from architects in Guangzhou, was that a number of Chinese practices employed students to scan images of famous buildings, old and new, into their design software and build them afresh. The results were comic-book versions of buildings from Europe and the United States dotted across the new map of capitalist China.

Ten years makes a big difference. In last week’s Building magazine (paywall), David Matthews reports on a form of copying that has far more serious implications – not just for the art of architecture, but its practice, business and profession. Matthews reveals that at least two prominent British practices have been hit by a wave of identity theft at the hands of Chinese impostors, which have cloned their websites and submitted bids for building projects under their names. Broadway Malyan, a firm with offices in 13 cities worldwide including Shanghai, is one such practice.

Aedas, which has offices in Beijing, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Macau, Shanghai and Shenyang, is the victim of a similar fraud. “We had a company that took the trouble of registering in the UK,” says David Roberts, the chief executive of Aedas in Asia. “They took information from our website and bid for projects. They had been submitting bids mainly for government projects before we found out.” While Aedas was able to close its doppelganger down through Beijing courts, Roberts said his company had been unable to track down those responsible.

Given the international nature of the most prestigious and lucrative construction projects, and the success British practices enjoy globally, such scams may well be the tip of a digital iceberg. To date, the thieves appear to have targeted large, global practices working on a wide range of commercial and infrastructure projects from hotels and office blocks to sports arenas and entire districts of new Chinese cities. But will the web pirates begin to raid British practices with a higher design profile? If Aedas and Broadway Maylan, why not Foster and Partners and Zaha Hadid?

It might be argued that architects have forever borrowed from one another, and even produced copybooks for others to follow. But this latest development moves beyond flattery into criminality. It’s one thing to see your latest work copied, but to have a fake firm snapping up contracts in your name is another thing altogether.