^Cast Courts at the Victoria & Albert Museum (source)
Aside from qualified usage in fine-art contexts, copying is generally
thought of as a negative act, something which detracts from its source, and
there are formidable legislative structures in place to prevent its unlicensed
proliferation. Originality, creativity, novelty, innovation, these are ideals
that we are told to actively pursue in our working lives. No management
consultant would come to your company and tell you to slavishly copy someone
else’s designs, or office structure down to the smallest detail, no matter how
great the office in question. No good contemporary teacher would ask his or her
class to memorise the entirety of an epic poem by rote, no matter how great the
poem.
Today’s all important quality is originality, and so the epic poem is not
memorised, but reinterpreted, not recited but performed and reinvented by the
class, all in the search for innovation. But copying in its most positive sense
is a creative act, in fact it lies at the very foundation of creativity. It is
only through the hard work of copying, of systematically reproducing something
as in traditional pedagogy, that one can fully digest and comprehend the fullness
of what came before, understand it in all its complexity, failures and
triumphs, and therefore be able to eventually move beyond it. Every time a new
Asian economy raises itself to manufacturing powerhouse status, I hear people
dismiss its rise as not being a threat to us because “they only know how to
copy, not innovate”. But it is precisely this movement through a period of
intense study, analysis and imitation of predecessors that paves the way for a
profound and entirely singular leap forward in firmly grounded innovation. Just
look at those copiers who are now arch-innovators like Japan, Taiwan, emerging S Korea
and soon China.
Without the studied and entirely positive process of copying,
we will only move like crabs sideways, endlessly searching for titillating
novelty which is bereft of substance, because genuine newness comes rarely, and
can only arise out of a totally thorough understanding of what came before. Architectural
education currently has a dearth of copying and a surfeit of apparent novelty.
If given precedents at all, students (even in their first year) are pressured
to critically re-read, re-interpret, re-analyse and rapidly re-design and
re-imagine whatever building, project, square, or city they have been handed to
study. There is never the slightest chance that they may have the time to
slowly comprehend the subtle complexities of their object of analysis, and
thereby be handed the chance to one day surpass it. Instead they are goaded
into generating sexy click-bait that has all the depth of a very
well-illustrated conceit, and like satirical illustrations are entirely
dependent on precedents that have been barely understood, let alone been
superseded. Let us have a break from originality for a while, let the kids
copy.
