Un/Fair Use, was presented at the Center for Architecture in New York. The exhibition, exploring issues of copying and copyright in architecture, was curated and designed by designer, editor, and writer Sarah Hirschman and Ana Miljački, PhD, Professor of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Appropriation is at the very core of the architecture. The discipline advances via comment, criticism, parody, and innovation, reworkings that are all easily grouped under the umbrella of fair use. But what about when appropriation is deemed unfair? Where and how do we draw the lines around what is permissible? Un/Fair Use probes that legal boundary, illuminating the strange constellation of protections provided by the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act of 1990 (AWCPA).
In Un/Fair Use, models of common, and therefore uncopyrightable, tropes and formal themes are juxtaposed with those protected under the AWCPA. 3D-printed models present formal tropes sufficiently widespread to be deemed “fair use.”
Un/Fair Use also explored the idea of the law as a participant in the construction of the public’s architectural imagination. The law as it applies to architectural practice is unglamorous. It’s a collection of statues and legal language that is most often associated with litigation, with contentious neighbors, and with costly reviews. Architecture law is rarely interrogated as a cultural artifact, as a trace of how architectural discourse enters and is digested in public thought. Each time a case is brought before a court, new terms are defined and new notions of architectural creativity and operation are tested.
Exhibition materials were compiled during the graduate research workshop at MIT, “Appropriation: The Work of Architecture in the Age of Copyright,” which was led by Hirschman and Miljački.
Exhibition was curated and designed by Sarah Hirschman and Ana Miljački.