Former Yale student sues designer of Freedom Tower
I remember some talk about teachers "borrowing" their students designs when I was a student at the university. I actually knew personally of one student whose design plate for a restaurant was copied by his teacher without his knowledge and he only knew about it when he saw the restaurant built.
Well who would have thought that it could happen to something involving a structure as prominent as the Freedom Tower in New York. Well it has.
Here are the details from the Associated Press:
A former architectural student sued the designers of the World Trade Center site's planned Freedom Tower on Monday, saying designs for the skyscraper mirror those he created at Yale University.
Thomas Shine, of Brookline, Mass., is seeking unspecified damages in federal court in Manhattan for what he said was the theft of his designs.
It's the "Freedom Tower" on the left
and "Olympic Tower" on the right.
You be the judge.
Named as defendants were David Childs and the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP. A message left with Childs at the firm was not immediately returned.
The lawsuit alleged that the Freedom Tower was "strikingly similar" to Shine's designs for a Manhattan building for the proposed 2012 Olympic Games in New York.
It said Childs saw the designs when he served in 1999 on a panel of jurists invited by the Yale School of Architecture to evaluate the students' work.
The Olympic design featured a twisting tower with a twisting structural grid and a textured facade, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleged that the design for the Freedom Tower shown to the public in December 2003 incorporated an identical structural grid.
The cornerstone was laid on July 4 for the Freedom Tower, which will be the first skyscraper to go up at the 16-acre trade center site.
The tower's final form is a compromise of designs by Childs and architect Daniel Libeskind, a designer of the master plan for redevelopment of the trade center site.
posted by ben tumbling @ 2:40 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
David Childs is turning out to be quite the asshole.... first he rapes Libeskind's proposal and replaces what seemed to be a half-interesting piece of architecture from Libeskind into this prismic steel dick.... and now comes evidence that he's actually stolen this dick from some tom-DICK-and harry?
He should just go the Norman Foster route.... erect a REAL dick!
Nakanamboogie, you kiss your mama with that mouth? hehehe
Liebskind actually has a reputation of being very difficult to work with within the architectural circles here. His brush ins with other architects have even been documented in society columns so I'm not surprised that he and Childs would butt heads.
As to the plagiarism claim against Childs, I'd like to see how this plays out. This will definitely have a lot of implications.
going back to a previous article. I would rather the architect of the UP grandstand copy a student's good design than what was actuated.
Not that i condone plagiarism.
Bu...
I think it would be obvious that a guy who designs like Daniel Libeskind will not get along with many other architects... because his work after all defies many basic tenets on what we would think to be sound architecture....
Please do not think of me as an apologist of some sort for Daniel Libeskind, I am a fan I admit, but I think that his best building is already behind him.
It would be interesting to note however how his Jewish Museum ahs also been ripped off by some Australian architects....
I guess what I'm trying to say is not so much as either Childs and/or Libeskind are horrors...(they could be, though that would definietely be another subject altogether). Perhaps it is alrgely a matter of the kind of architects they are.... a design director of SOM and a guys who designs buildings as an antithesis to SOM's work.... it seems to have sounded like a match made in hell form the beginning.
There are of course many bizarre and successful combinations.... but I think somehow many saw this coming....
But going back to the issue of "copying"... somehow I think that that is a line far too thin to tread on.... perhaps that line no longer exists... or no one bothers to pay attention to anymore.... either way, we as architects/desingers are all as responsible as we are in danger of this....
I agree with your observation about the "thin line" between originality and copying these days.
Everything that could be done seems to have been already done and all we can do is make permutations out of them wether conciously or unconciously.
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