Residents of the Austrian mountain town of Hallstatt, population 800, are scandalized. A Chinese firm has plans to replicate the village — including its famous lake — in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, Austrian media reported this week…
But creating an exact duplicate of a city may not be legal, according to Hans-Jörg Kaiser from Icomos Austria, the national board for monument preservation under UNESCO. “The legal situation still needs to be examined,” he said. Building new structures based on photographs is legal, he explained, but owners must give their permission for them to be measured.
This isn’t the first time a Chinese firm has used a European place as inspiration. The Chinese city of Anting, some 30 kilometers from Shanghai, created a district designed to accommodate 20,000 residents called “German Town Anting.” Modelled after a typical mid-size German city by architecture firm Albert Speer & Partner, it includes Bauhaus style architecture and a fountain with statues of Goethe and Schiller.
In 2005 Chengdu British Town was modelled on the English town of Dorchester. One year later Thames Town was finished near Shanghai, complete with a 66-meter tall church that bears a striking resemblance to a cathedral in Bristol. Also near Shanghai are mini versions of Barcelona, Venice and the Scandinavian-inspired Nordic Town. The architectural plagiarisms are popular destinations among middle-class Chinese, even serving as backdrops for wedding photos.
Pictures here.
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Japan and Las Vegas among others have copies of world renown monuments and cities, why is this any different? The places in question are beautiful and idyllic, and somehow it’s wrong that someone else wants to copy that for themselves?
Give me a break. What a bunch of whiners.
This makes the Chinese look so pathetic. They have to copy other towns for inspiration? What about their own rather remarkable architectural style? The Asians have long been fond of copying the West and not innovating on their own, but this is a bit much.
It is about fantasizing. Don’t you like to fantasize sometimes? The idea is to go to an entirely different world and live an entirely different life? An escape from the dull and mundane routine of everyday existence? Like a trip to Disneyland.
Speaking of Disneyland, when Euro-Disneyland was first opened there where problems because it was modeled based on the American rather than European habits. But similar problems where not visible in the Disneyland of Tokyo or Hong-Kong. Why? Do American tourists and Asian tourists have similar habits? Actually, it is the desire for fantasy. When they go to Disneyland, they like to imagine themselves playing the role of an American tourist in the American Disneyland. It is part of the fun. Here is another instance for those who know the TV show ‘Friends’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12223341
A Xerox of an English or German town serves a similar purpose for those that cannot afford the trip to Europe. Pretending to be a German in a picturesque German town maybe fun. But if you cannot afford it you may want to consider pretending to be a German in a replica of a picturesque German town closer to home. That is not only fun but easier on your wallet.
Copying is awesome. It totally disagree with you. I like Chinese architecture in many cases and copying it is a way to make something neat nearby. It’s nice to know they think the same way.
It’s amazing that these architects that worked on this claim that they designed the structures on their own, without acknowledging the original places they copied from.
I don’t know how popular these tourist sites are when it comes to staging wedding photos, but when I visited China 5 years ago I saw quite a few of these developments which were practically devoid of any visitors, paying or otherwise. Most of the places I visited were huge and stunningly expensive in their details. Some of the sites were completely open and fully staffed, but most of them were unfinished and often they were either partly or completely abandoned. Sometimes the building standards were very high, sometimes they were slipshod or defective. Making safe, durable stairways and sidewalks seems to be particularly difficult for the Chinese. All the money is spent “for show” in the facades, roof lines and decorative elements but the pedestrian and road access are usually an afterthought.
Evidently many billions of dollars of money borrowed from state banks have been thrown into tourist attractions, and I don’t think that they will ever be patronized to anywhere near the degree that will be required even to pay for their upkeep, let alone repay the capital cost. Meanwhile the old, traditional sites are still heavily patronized by millions of Chinese and foreign tourists, especially Buddhist temples and places of natural beauty which have been praised in old poems. These sites are supported partly through the modest gate receipts and partly through donations by wealthy foreign Chinese.
The reason why the Chinese are imitating foreign tourist attractions is probably because every part of China is already well-stocked with authentic Chinese cultural landmarks such as temples and gardens. If there is a quota assigned to regional and municipal governments (“add five more major tourist attractions … or else”) then one could see why they would see no need to build yet another temple. They lack the sophistication to be able to imitate Western art in the way of Las Vegas, which succeeds by copying with a humorous flair while still making the buildings commercially viable and usable. Evidently they cannot “send up” Chinese traditional culture because it is frozen in rigid, sacred forms. So the only safe thing they can do is try to copy foreign architecture down to the last lick of paint – in a superficial, meaningless and wasteful way.
I don’t know what the commotion is since Hallstatt seems to be something that Disney would manufacture. I had a hard time telling which pictures were the fake Chinese version and the real deal. Both seem to go through major designing and upkeep to hold the “quaint” feel. Who seriously arranges their gardening equipment on the side of their house in picturesque artistic arrangements? All the houses are perfectly upkept without visible flaws. Even the lake seems to be devoid of any natural debris that ends up floating on the surface, like they dredge it nightly. It looks nothing like a quaint Austrian town and everything like a groomed tourist attraction. If they want to find an insult, they should look at themselves and how they’ve turned into a modern marketing machine that they’re attempting to call China on.
These kinds of impractical (and probably unprofitable) building projects seem like a sign of far too much credit. If foolish construction like this can be undertaken, somebody must be foolishly financing it.
How can this not be “legal”? What kind of law would apply? How would the Austrian State sue? Ridiculous.
“Architecture firm Albert Speer & Partner”
This is some kind of joke right?
If you wait a few hours you’ll get Wildberry and here berating you for not respecting Hallstatt’s “intellectual property interests” or something and that the Chinese will rue the day they decided to recreate the city on their own soil.
El Tonno, this is Albert Speer, Jr., grandson of the Albert Speer you’re probably thinking of.
One of the largest architecture firms in Germany.
Another thing that all urban planners and imitators of quaint architecture should keep in mind is that the most beautiful and quaint-looking landscapes were never centrally planned, but always evolved spontaneously and chaotically according to the needs of the private property owners. Nobody sat down and designed a fairy-tale village beside a lake in Germany or a patchwork of green, rolling hills in England, but individuals over many centuries built and enlarged private houses and farms according to their own personal economic and aesthetic values. Central planners can ape this beautiful chaos, but they can never reproduce it or replace it.
Most laughable are the planners who try to preserve a historical building, town or landscape, by freezing it in time and preventing “owners” (more like government serfs) from making any substantial changes. It is a recipe for poverty and ugliness. Whenever they try that preservation crap with a very large and ancient building on a nice, valuable piece of land, one of two things happens. If the owner is in a hurry, for example to pay back the banks, the building mysteriously burns down. If not in a hurry then the roof leaks, the cornices crumble, cracks and mold develop, and voila, the building must be torn down in the public interest. Even the ugliness and waste serve the interest of the government lords, because they can then command even more money and power in the name of fixing the tremendous blight that they caused. The serfs in China whose savings are diverted into building fake villages this year will be drafted next year into work teams to haul the ruins of the villages to the dump. Guess who benefits?
Hasn’t Tsingtao been pretty German-looking for a century or more?
“But creating an exact duplicate of a city may not be legal, according to Hans-Jörg Kaiser from Icomos Austria, the national board for monument preservation under UNESCO.”
A pity the reporter didn’t push mr. Kaiser further and asked him for the actual laws the chinese might be infringing…
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