Forget Louis Vuitton knockoffs: China has been churning out counterfeits of the West’s greatest architectural hits, from UNESCO heritage zones and Le Corbusier icons to Manhattan skyscrapers and Orange County gated communities.
My book Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China examines China’s “duplitecture” movement—the construction of monumentally themed communities that replicate the West’s most iconic locales. I take a look inside the walls of these faux-Versailles homes and Paris knockoffs to explore why China copies and what these copycat developments reveal about the new Chinese Dream.
Photo by Bianca Bosker