Plagiarizing design, is a serious moral and ethical issue, especially in the architectural profession. Hence this NYT article is of interest.It talks about a plagiarizing issue that has been going on in the NY architectural circle for a long time now. The accused is David Childs, the head of arguably the world’s largest corporate architecture firm, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, they of the Sears Towers fame. The issue is not as simple as it seems.
…there were enough similarities between David M. Childs’s 2003 design for the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site and a 1999 student architectural project that a lawsuit against Mr. Childs for copyright violation could proceed….
It brings to the forefront, the very tricky issue of intellectual property rights.
“The court recognized that architectural works are entitled to copyright protection just like any other type of creative work.”
The issue gets even more bizarre when you consider Richard Meier, one of the foremost American architects practising today has to say.
“It is ironic, to say the least,” Mr. Meier wrote, “that the plaintiff should claim rights over a mode of construction – the perimeter structural diagrid – that was effectively invented and developed by S.O.M.”
Incidentally the inventor of the diagrid concept was structural engineer Fazlur Khan who worked at SOM, for a major portion of his career. He was born in pre-9147 India, but then lived and studied in East Pakistan, till he moved and settled in the US.
August 11, 2005
Suit Claiming Similarities in Tower Design Can Proceed
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
A federal judge ruled yesterday that there were enough similarities between David M. Childs’s 2003 design for the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site and a 1999 student architectural project that a lawsuit against Mr. Childs for copyright violation could proceed.
The student, Thomas Shine, now an architect in Brookline, Mass., sued Mr. Childs and his firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, last year. He charged that they had copied Freedom Tower from Olympic Tower, Mr. Shine’s project at the Yale School of Architecture, which Mr. Childs saw and admired as a jurist critiquing students’ work. Skidmore denied the allegation. And the resemblance.
Judge Michael B. Mukasey, chief judge of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, said in his ruling yesterday that some lay observers “might find that the Freedom Tower’s twisting shape and undulating diamond-shaped facade make it substantially similar to Olympic Tower, and therefore an improper appropriation” of copyrighted artistic expression.
On the other hand, the judge acknowledged that it is “possible, even likely, that some ordinary observers might not find the two towers to be substantially similar,” as Skidmore had asserted in moving to have the case dismissed.
The Freedom Tower design in question – a torqued and tapered skyscraper with a lacy diagonal structural network known as a diagrid – has been withdrawn because of security objections raised by the New York Police Department.
Mr. Childs has already designed the replacement: a glass-and-steel structure rising like an obelisk from an almost impermeable 200-foot concrete base. So it does not seem that the outcome of this case will affect the construction schedule of Freedom Tower.
But it is one more cloud over a project that was born in controversy two years ago, when it became clear that the commercial leaseholder at the trade center site, Larry A. Silverstein, did not want his signature skyscraper to be designed by Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the site. He chose Mr. Childs instead.
What followed, in the second half of 2003, was an awkward and sometimes stormy collaboration between Mr. Childs and Mr. Libeskind that resulted in a design to which Mr. Shine, 41, has now staked a claim. He practices in the firm of Choi & Shine.
Mr. Shine’s lawyer, Andrew Baum of Darby & Darby, said he and his client were thrilled by Judge Mukasey’s ruling.
“Ironically, even though it was a well-known architect who came out on the short end of this, I think it’s a victory for architects and the profession of architecture,” Mr. Baum said yesterday. “The court recognized that architectural works are entitled to copyright protection just like any other type of creative work.”
However, Judge Mukasey agreed with Skidmore that there were no significant similarities between Freedom Tower and another student project by Mr. Shine called Shine ’99. “There is no evidence to suggest that Childs would have thought of the idea of a twisting tower only by viewing Shine ’99,” the judge wrote in his 27-page ruling.
A spokeswoman for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Elizabeth H. Kubany, said in an e-mail message yesterday: “We are pleased that the judge has decided that one of Shine’s two claims was not worthy to go to trial. We are confident that we will prevail on the remaining issue.”
She noted that some exhibits submitted by Mr. Shine showed Olympic Tower twisting in a clockwise direction, where his actual model twisted counterclockwise. “When S.O.M.’s counsel pointed out that Mr. Shine had doctored three of these images to exaggerate the similarities between the two designs, his attorney was forced to withdraw them,” Ms. Kubany said. “I think this speaks volumes about the merits of his case.”
Judge Mukasey wrote that a plaintiff like Mr. Shine “may prove actual copying by showing that defendants had access to his copyrighted works, and that similarities that suggest copying exist between the protected works and the alleged infringing work.”
Olympic Tower and Shine ’99 emerged from a studio in skyscraper design taught by the architect Cesar Pelli. The object was to propose a skyscraper for the 2012 Olympics. On Dec. 9, 1999, Mr. Shine presented his designs for a twisting tower with a diagonal column grid to a panel including Mr. Childs, who was quoted in the architecture school magazine Retrospecta as having said to Mr. Shine, “It is a very beautiful shape.” Mr. Shine registered his projects with the Copyright Office in 2004.
Comparing Olympic Tower and Freedom Tower, Judge Mukasey said any lay observer would notice that each tapered and twisted; each had an undulating, textured, diamond-patterned facade; and each had a diamond pattern at the base. That combination, he said, gave them a “similar ‘total concept and feel’ that is immediately apparent even to an untrained judicial eye.”
In their motion to dismiss, Mr. Childs and Skidmore said, “In the late 1990’s – around the time Shine was at Yale – there was a virtual tidal wave of twisting tower projects.” They added, “While Shine may have decided to ride this wave when he began his studio project at Yale, he was not the progenitor of the concept.”
Supporting their motion, the architect Richard Meier said he found “no significant resemblance” between the designs, nor any basis for Mr. Shine’s copyright.
“It is ironic, to say the least,” Mr. Meier wrote, “that the plaintiff should claim rights over a mode of construction – the perimeter structural diagrid – that was effectively invented and developed by S.O.M.”
