Ex-Yale student sues
Freedom Tower designers
Architecture grad says design
for twisting skyscraper is his
Updated: 12:48 a.m. ET Nov. 9, 2004
NEW YORK - 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.
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.
hmmm......was this yale guy the original guy who did the bendy buildings???? perhaps only strikingly similar and his true inspiration....
how many office buildings do ya figure have 'identical structural grids?
when was the last time you sat on a jury taking away a thought....'boy what a great structural grid pattern, think ill nick it for my next big one......'
dont they teach professional practice at yale? this guy doesnt realize how difficult it is to prove copyright infringement let alone theft of design?.....get a life.
Ted:
In a way I agree, but I'd be willing to bet that A$$hole Childs would do the same if the tables was turned.
What makes Childs an architect is rentable space factor and building codes, nothing more.
Sorry Childs, you are very angry man. You CAN change and maybe then you can offer something positive to the life of humanity.
I agree with TED. That isn't going to be an easy one to win in court. None the less I'm no fan of Childs or SOM and wouldn't mind seeing them lose something, if nothing else at least some clients respect. What scares me is a win for this Yale student could set a precedent of architects running around suing each other over designs. As if we don't already have enough litigation in this business.
aren't a student's designs produced in academia legally property of the institution the student was attending while said designs were produced?
i remember learning that at some point while i was in school.
stephanie, i believe you are right. student designs are property of the university [at least they were at my university]. agreeing with ted too. get a life kid.
and yale won't do that. the idea is not what's important ie. the identical structural grid. it's what you do with the idea. we could each be charged with designing a twisting tower using an identical structural grid, and i bet each tower would look distinctly different.
there is no way to win something like this. People 'borrow' ideas and forms all the time. Look at the Meier rip offs everywhere, and even he 'borrowed' 90% of his aesthetic!
No, all you can do is try to be better and more original in your next project. Not to mention how much happens without intention. I look at tons of images, and once in a while I'll sketch something I love and have to scratch my head for a few days to pin point where it came from.
It's just part of the creative world, for better or worse.
I think Guy Nordensen dreamed it up anyway, not David Childs. If I remember correctly he had a twisty tower in the Herb Muschamp designs for Lower Manhattan NYTimes Magazine Special. Anyway, this reminds me of imagebytekid, as TED says.
Yes Javier I think you're right. Guy was the guy. David put a skin on it. Nope, sorry that was James Carpenter. Hey wait a minute wasn't that Pataki that glomed together the freedom tower? Maybe that kid needs to sue Pataki.
What a damn disgrace, as if that site hasn't seen enough money grubbing and power grabbing. Let's go back to Libeskind's and find out how to make that original idea work financially.
We need pictures of each tower so that the images can talk for themselves and lay out the case.
I think David Childs went to Guy Nordensen with the stolen design already drawn. Only after the insider information provided by Childs did Nordensen engineer it.
I think Guy had an idea for a structural grid for a tower which twists and David thought that would work well for this tower. Guy and SOM NY collaborate a lot.
Architecture is a collaborative process esp. for a high-rise! I haven’t even seen the design which was supposedly stolen. If anyone has an image that would help.
It seems a bit strange, but maybe yale were/are so way ahead of the times that they were already planning/running studios for the NY 2012 olympics back in 1999.
I dont really buy that though.
Kid should have taken out a patent on his structural grid at the time!
I found an old copy of the 199-2000 "Retrospecta," an annual publication of student work at the Yale School of Architecture.
A scanned image of page 99 has been posted to the Archinect image Gallery.
the text on the right is a transcript of the final review commentary, where David Childs, among others was present as jurors. Other jury members were Cesar Pelli, Bill Butler, Robert Stern, Paul Goldberger, Stanley Tigerman, Alexander Garvin, Carol Willis of the Skyscraper Museum and Diane Agrest.
David Child's documented commentary below is rather revealing.
+++++++++++++++++++
THOMAS ADLER SHINE: The building appears as just another tall building as a silhouette from far away in New York City. The form changes depending on the angle as you get closer and closer to the building. Driving down 11th Avenue the building slowly unwinds as you see the facade and the light reflecting off the window mullions. You might see something that may appear as a flame going up slowly. Moving in closer to the building a secondary system takes over which is the skin of the building based on triangulating the form and breaking it down so you get a reading of both the mass of the building and the height. The building starts on the Manhattan grid with the form generated by a shift twisted off center and then aligned. Rather than having horizontal and vertical bracing, I just crossed the entire building so there are no vertical columns apart from the core of the building-it is all slightly diagonal.
DAVID M. CHILDS: It’s a very beautiful shape. You took the skin and developed it around the form- great!
ALEXANDER D. GARVIN: It is totally different no mater where you are, because of the surface modules, which is oddly contextual.
PAUL GOLDBERGER: can you tell us al little about the base and the entrance?
THOMAS ADLER SHINE: The idea was to mark the entrance. So you come into the lobby and you see not just the skin but the solid mass of the building. It is aligned so that the three elevator cores, at least on the ground floor, line up with the three entrances of the building, so there is a continuous reading through the skin.
PAUL GOLDBERGER: We have seen a whole lot of buildings that are not essentially entered. Here not only is there an entrance, but the entrance derives from the themes he is playing with in the facades.
Images from the official SHINE vs SOM legal filings documenting the side by side similarities of the twin towers have been posted to the image gallery.
Suture, your not by chance the mysterious mr. shine are u? that would be an archinect scoop!
i remember similar structural directions with arup/novel and since guy was a director at arups and knowing skids pretty well, tower ideas are at skids are driven first by the strong engineering colloboration not by guys like childs who if you look at his body of work is all over the place with no clear consistant idea or path.
do you know who worked with shine at yale? clearly as a work that is pursing some a form of scholarship, he would have pursued ideas and theory about structure and form and more than likely had a strong collaboration with many from that end. particularly if there was a written thesis with the design, i would suggest the project would have been discussed relative to critical thought within similar boundaries.
dont look for resolve on ethics from the aia. it has a very narrow definition and basicly only protect those who can prove the had a formal involvement on a project without receiving any acknowledgement / credit....and the punishment??? forbidden for a year to use AIA [or FAIA in the case of childs] for a year. oh boy. he's only a consulting partner now anyway -- doesnt really matter for him,
the projects do look very similar indeed.
so does the mean if the lawsuit becomes credible, look for lots of so called 'respected' practitioners to avoid involvement with institutions fearing students tort challenges?
then the bigger questions is.....
shouldnt universities be the source and think tank for architects to view for inspiration? afterall practices like skids and their foundation give thousands per year to fellowships in addition to supporting programs directly?
as common a thing copying in architecture is, this does look a little more blatent. but hey, thats part of the profession.
at any given time in history, buildings look alike because people copy each other. now that twisting towers and diamond-grids are becoming part of the current syntax, shine will realize he wasn't the first or the last to use them.
Before I thought the kid should stop the griping and sit down. but after seeing those pictures side by side...I say mr. childs has some explaining to do. He straight up jacked his shit!
There's also a book called "Twist and Build" by Karel Vollers, 010 publisher, from a few years ago that was devoted almost entirely to the notion of a twisting highrise -- going through the history of twisting/warped surface facades in architecture -- and resulting in the development of twisted curving curtain wall systems. Check it out...
I don't know, neither design looks distinguished enough to be significant as a design, and without significance, I don't see how it matters. There are other twisting buildings out there.
No doubt Childs stole some stuff, but I agree with silverlake and TED that it's just part of the game. Shine's design is pretty boring, imho. Neat structure, but that's all there is - a one liner. Child's may have taken a one liner, put some windmills and a tooth pick point at the top, thereby making it unique.
If you are going to sue someone for this, it's got to be so specific and blatant that no one could mistake the similarity. Copying someone else's structural solution simply does not qualify as that.
Amusing, though. Maybe it'll force them to hold off on the project and they will have to hire someone else. That'd be fine (as long as it wasn't any of the other competition entries).
Imho, this would be a real event if either of the designs were good. But I don't see how anyone can say they even reach the lavel of good. My 7 year old neice said the design looked old fashioned.
i'm on the same tip as kissy- at first i thought he had no case, but after seeing those images AND childs' name clearly on his jury comments right NEXT to the image he ripped off of him, its really hard to see childs getting out of this without being burned somewhere.
the similarity is actually significant. the structure in this case IS integral with the aesthetic of the building. yeah- its a twisting mundane design, but they're splitting mirrored images using almost even the same spacing for the diamond grid structural system.
the kid may not win the case, but someone's going to get reamed for the ripoff....
1) I am definitely not Tom Shine. With a story of this magnitude and profile, Tom Shine will surely have a larger media outlet to present his case than Archinect. I am just another student who happened to be attending Yale during Tom Shine’s last year there. Access to the posted images is from public documents: the 1999-2000 Yale School of Architecture and the A.P. wire service.
2) you ask, “shouldnt universities be the source and think tank for architects to view for inspiration? afterall practices like skids and their foundation give thousands per year to fellowships in addition to supporting programs directly?â€Â
“Inspiration†maybe, but I don’t know of any place in academia that condones plagiarism as part of their educational model.
And I hope you are not proposing bribery as an institutional fund-raising model. A few $10,000 travel checks do not buy architecture firms legal immunity. Should a firm want to “borrow†a students talents and abilities, most firms are a much smarter than SOM and David Childs-they usually hire the students they want. At the very least the students/ workers are compensated, be it in a small way, for their time and ideas. In this case, SOM and David Childs simply stole an idea from a student and presented it as their very own. That is plain wrong. The comparative images speak for themselves.
As Kissy_face said, “mr. childs has some explaining to do. He straight up jacked his shit!â€Â
Mies would have made a killing if this case had set a precedent a 100 years ago. Last time I was walking around New York City drunk, I thought every building was the Seagram building.
unfortunately, images alone dont make a case for 'theft' of an idea as i believe there are prescedents out there that are the basis for both design directions. i would anticipate the basis of the case will be copyright and shine's own direct 'authorship' will be put on trial particularly if a written thesis places the relavance of the design idea within a broad or specific reference.
i am not saying that because of a foundation, it gives skids or any firm / individual carte blance to nick this and that. we [the profession] rely on institutions to pursue research and ideas in speculative / experimental venues as most in the real world cant pursue research within the meager fees the field offers. every project i start, i constantly read, look, read to get reinspired. am i stealing buildings, no. building upon those thoughts and threads, yes.
skids is a bottom up office; the so called brillant ideas generally come from below the partner who tends to be a design manager[sic] at best [management is not skids strong point]. over the last 3-5 years, skids has almost exclusive recuited from the best of the ivies for designers [or at least tried]. i would look to possibly a yale cronie to shine who worked on the project for skids who would have taken the time and effort to bring blindly the inspiration to the project [or at least the public docs]. i think childs directly, being full of himself, would not think any students work was worthy of his signature. its just the way skids works.
DAVID M. CHILDS: It’s a very beautiful shape. You took the skin and developed it around the form- great!
ALEXANDER D. GARVIN: It is totally different no mater where you are, because of the surface modules, which is oddly contextual.
PAUL GOLDBERGER: can you tell us al little about the base and the entrance?
-----
.. at this point DC said he was gonna take a piss and left the area. he was seen as he was placing a call to his office,
"we've been hijacked".
so, could it be the other way around?
then again, like the old chess wisdom,
"every move has been done before".
the whole thing (WTC) is an excellent feature film material. b.pitt as shine, anthony hopkins as childs, libeskind playing himself and featuring Patrick Markesano as the judge.
now that i think about it, did anyone ever sign anything saying there work was property of the schools they were in? according to this train of thought, someone could technically start making claims to all sorts of things like say... your soul. i say your sould is mine, therefore it is.
seriously, what validity is there to a school claiming your work as its property if you never agree to it? if you ended up getting money for something you designed in school, could they really lay claim to that? sure, they should have rights to post your work, but until the day my school shows me where i signed over all rights to my work, its mine.
oh man some of us architects can be such pompos assholes - yes even i hate childs, but -
how the hell can someone even think that a 'twisted structural grid with textured glass' can be like a unique patented idea???
its really stupid when people compare their formal investigations to nobel-prize winning scientific ideas
such people just increase the bad rap architects get in the industry
shit man..i might get involve in this, per; undisclosed 'tower' detail.
lawyer buddy called me just now about the said detail he has seen in my office. I, might get a piece o the pie..
t-shirts on me..
If libeskind hadnt pushed so hard for the statue of liberty image there would be no spire on top.
There was a full documentary over here on the whole saga a few months back.
Really sad to see the SOM guys playing around with different shaped spires (or toothpicks) standing back and admiring the complete lack of anything.
The whole thing is a heap of very messy messiness.
From Libeskinds wedge of light idea, which didnt work then got turned around and backed out, to the SOM takeover.
My guess is that SOM might try and settle. Its not going to be a quiet thing though and I think Shine will try and push it as far as he can, maybe too far, which will lead to a big court with the verdict being case waste of money that should be donated to something more meaningful.
AFH for example.
Sure its an important site, and maybe thats why the hawks are circling, but what happens to the memories.
Soon we are going to have group/mass law suits from relatives suiing for the lack of architectural integrity Witnesses who graduated from Yale in 1999 testifying, and Libeskind standing in the corner thinking thank fuck they didnt notice that I ripped the freedom tower idea from an architectural student in Frankfurt from 1998 who was a designing an olympic tower for the Berlin Olympics in 1942.
And all the time the martians will just be laughing at us!
This is some sorry assed shit, but its damn funny.
Not to sound supercilious but you misspelled "pompos."
And indeed it would be pompous for anyone to assume a patent on the twist. Chubby Checker could sue many people many times over and around till he fell over dizzy.
Calatrava’s example cited above is an excellent comparison and only serves to highlight the extreme extents that David Childs went to in order to create an exact facsimile of the original Tom Shine design.
Calatrava has BORROWED the public domain idea of a twisty tower. His tower does indeed twist AND the model distinctly articulates each ‘vertebrae’ of the spine-cum-skyscraper as groupings of floors so that it looks completely unique to the Shine design. Calatrava had the ethics, self-respect, decency and above all else the architectural TALENT to make the twist his own- it’s a Calatrava twist on the twist if you will. And it’s a nice tower.
The Photoshop bottom/top side/side comparison of a Shine to Calatrava design would not hold up. They are distinct. We have 2 nice yet different towers.
On the other hand, David Childs has copied not only the twist and presented it as his own,
but the facade,
as well as the structure,
then the entry,
also the baying,
uses the language...
…at what point if any has David Childs stopped his slavish mimicry of the original Tom Shine design?
The side by side Photoshop suturing of the Shine to SOM knock-off is peculiarly uncanny.
At minimum should David Childs, having been present at the final review where he saw the Shine design, admit to being influenced by the Tom Shine Design? His commentary sure suggest he was quite fond of the design from the second he saw it.
Give credit where credit is due. There are 3 towers and only one looks different. Sesame Street pick the one out that looks different and presto we have two Towers. I don’t think this is what anyone meant when they asked that the Twin Towers be rebuilt
one point on your reference to Calatrava design. Calatrava's design is dervied directly from a sculpture he composed in the past which the developer convinced Calatrava to design a building based on this concept
looks like SOM is an SOB
AP File
Ex-Yale student sues
Freedom Tower designers
Architecture grad says design
for twisting skyscraper is his
Updated: 12:48 a.m. ET Nov. 9, 2004
NEW YORK - 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.
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.
hmmm......was this yale guy the original guy who did the bendy buildings???? perhaps only strikingly similar and his true inspiration....
how many office buildings do ya figure have 'identical structural grids?
when was the last time you sat on a jury taking away a thought....'boy what a great structural grid pattern, think ill nick it for my next big one......'
dont they teach professional practice at yale? this guy doesnt realize how difficult it is to prove copyright infringement let alone theft of design?.....get a life.
Ted:
In a way I agree, but I'd be willing to bet that A$$hole Childs would do the same if the tables was turned.
What makes Childs an architect is rentable space factor and building codes, nothing more.
Sorry Childs, you are very angry man. You CAN change and maybe then you can offer something positive to the life of humanity.
And I bet SOM make a killing off that design . . .
I agree with TED. That isn't going to be an easy one to win in court. None the less I'm no fan of Childs or SOM and wouldn't mind seeing them lose something, if nothing else at least some clients respect. What scares me is a win for this Yale student could set a precedent of architects running around suing each other over designs. As if we don't already have enough litigation in this business.
aren't a student's designs produced in academia legally property of the institution the student was attending while said designs were produced?
i remember learning that at some point while i was in school.
stephanie, i believe you are right. student designs are property of the university [at least they were at my university]. agreeing with ted too. get a life kid.
so techincally, wouldn't yale have to sue SOM?
and yale won't do that. the idea is not what's important ie. the identical structural grid. it's what you do with the idea. we could each be charged with designing a twisting tower using an identical structural grid, and i bet each tower would look distinctly different.
Reminds me of this story...
there is no way to win something like this. People 'borrow' ideas and forms all the time. Look at the Meier rip offs everywhere, and even he 'borrowed' 90% of his aesthetic!
No, all you can do is try to be better and more original in your next project. Not to mention how much happens without intention. I look at tons of images, and once in a while I'll sketch something I love and have to scratch my head for a few days to pin point where it came from.
It's just part of the creative world, for better or worse.
I think Guy Nordensen dreamed it up anyway, not David Childs. If I remember correctly he had a twisty tower in the Herb Muschamp designs for Lower Manhattan NYTimes Magazine Special. Anyway, this reminds me of imagebytekid, as TED says.
Yes Javier I think you're right. Guy was the guy. David put a skin on it. Nope, sorry that was James Carpenter. Hey wait a minute wasn't that Pataki that glomed together the freedom tower? Maybe that kid needs to sue Pataki.
What a damn disgrace, as if that site hasn't seen enough money grubbing and power grabbing. Let's go back to Libeskind's and find out how to make that original idea work financially.
We need pictures of each tower so that the images can talk for themselves and lay out the case.
I think David Childs went to Guy Nordensen with the stolen design already drawn. Only after the insider information provided by Childs did Nordensen engineer it.
That's not the sequence I have heard.
I think Guy had an idea for a structural grid for a tower which twists and David thought that would work well for this tower. Guy and SOM NY collaborate a lot.
Architecture is a collaborative process esp. for a high-rise! I haven’t even seen the design which was supposedly stolen. If anyone has an image that would help.
It seems a bit strange, but maybe yale were/are so way ahead of the times that they were already planning/running studios for the NY 2012 olympics back in 1999.
I dont really buy that though.
Kid should have taken out a patent on his structural grid at the time!
I found an old copy of the 199-2000 "Retrospecta," an annual publication of student work at the Yale School of Architecture.
A scanned image of page 99 has been posted to the Archinect image Gallery.
the text on the right is a transcript of the final review commentary, where David Childs, among others was present as jurors. Other jury members were Cesar Pelli, Bill Butler, Robert Stern, Paul Goldberger, Stanley Tigerman, Alexander Garvin, Carol Willis of the Skyscraper Museum and Diane Agrest.
David Child's documented commentary below is rather revealing.
+++++++++++++++++++
THOMAS ADLER SHINE: The building appears as just another tall building as a silhouette from far away in New York City. The form changes depending on the angle as you get closer and closer to the building. Driving down 11th Avenue the building slowly unwinds as you see the facade and the light reflecting off the window mullions. You might see something that may appear as a flame going up slowly. Moving in closer to the building a secondary system takes over which is the skin of the building based on triangulating the form and breaking it down so you get a reading of both the mass of the building and the height. The building starts on the Manhattan grid with the form generated by a shift twisted off center and then aligned. Rather than having horizontal and vertical bracing, I just crossed the entire building so there are no vertical columns apart from the core of the building-it is all slightly diagonal.
DAVID M. CHILDS: It’s a very beautiful shape. You took the skin and developed it around the form- great!
ALEXANDER D. GARVIN: It is totally different no mater where you are, because of the surface modules, which is oddly contextual.
PAUL GOLDBERGER: can you tell us al little about the base and the entrance?
THOMAS ADLER SHINE: The idea was to mark the entrance. So you come into the lobby and you see not just the skin but the solid mass of the building. It is aligned so that the three elevator cores, at least on the ground floor, line up with the three entrances of the building, so there is a continuous reading through the skin.
PAUL GOLDBERGER: We have seen a whole lot of buildings that are not essentially entered. Here not only is there an entrance, but the entrance derives from the themes he is playing with in the facades.
<img src=http://www.archinect.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=7&pos=0>
I said something similar to Goldberg's ending comment once to a girl from Ohio as a pick-up line. Didn't work... Maybe in LA?
Images from the official SHINE vs SOM legal filings documenting the side by side similarities of the twin towers have been posted to the image gallery.
Pictures really are worth a thousand words.
Comparative images from the Shine vs. SOM case have been uploaded to the image gallery. View Here
Thats an Archinect EXCLUSIVE!
And i was told by the AIA website that all Architects are highly ethical.
too close for comfort mr childs..
this development could save the developer silver a lot of fee's.
shine<som. fire him hire him. shine. hmmm..
yikes
Suture, your not by chance the mysterious mr. shine are u? that would be an archinect scoop!
i remember similar structural directions with arup/novel and since guy was a director at arups and knowing skids pretty well, tower ideas are at skids are driven first by the strong engineering colloboration not by guys like childs who if you look at his body of work is all over the place with no clear consistant idea or path.
do you know who worked with shine at yale? clearly as a work that is pursing some a form of scholarship, he would have pursued ideas and theory about structure and form and more than likely had a strong collaboration with many from that end. particularly if there was a written thesis with the design, i would suggest the project would have been discussed relative to critical thought within similar boundaries.
dont look for resolve on ethics from the aia. it has a very narrow definition and basicly only protect those who can prove the had a formal involvement on a project without receiving any acknowledgement / credit....and the punishment??? forbidden for a year to use AIA [or FAIA in the case of childs] for a year. oh boy. he's only a consulting partner now anyway -- doesnt really matter for him,
the projects do look very similar indeed.
so does the mean if the lawsuit becomes credible, look for lots of so called 'respected' practitioners to avoid involvement with institutions fearing students tort challenges?
then the bigger questions is.....
shouldnt universities be the source and think tank for architects to view for inspiration? afterall practices like skids and their foundation give thousands per year to fellowships in addition to supporting programs directly?
as common a thing copying in architecture is, this does look a little more blatent. but hey, thats part of the profession.
at any given time in history, buildings look alike because people copy each other. now that twisting towers and diamond-grids are becoming part of the current syntax, shine will realize he wasn't the first or the last to use them.
....but SHINE on crazy diamond...
they both look like a big argyle condom. which is, i suppose, very appropriate for their scale.
Before I thought the kid should stop the griping and sit down. but after seeing those pictures side by side...I say mr. childs has some explaining to do. He straight up jacked his shit!
There's also a book called "Twist and Build" by Karel Vollers, 010 publisher, from a few years ago that was devoted almost entirely to the notion of a twisting highrise -- going through the history of twisting/warped surface facades in architecture -- and resulting in the development of twisted curving curtain wall systems. Check it out...
I don't know, neither design looks distinguished enough to be significant as a design, and without significance, I don't see how it matters. There are other twisting buildings out there.
No doubt Childs stole some stuff, but I agree with silverlake and TED that it's just part of the game. Shine's design is pretty boring, imho. Neat structure, but that's all there is - a one liner. Child's may have taken a one liner, put some windmills and a tooth pick point at the top, thereby making it unique.
If you are going to sue someone for this, it's got to be so specific and blatant that no one could mistake the similarity. Copying someone else's structural solution simply does not qualify as that.
Amusing, though. Maybe it'll force them to hold off on the project and they will have to hire someone else. That'd be fine (as long as it wasn't any of the other competition entries).
Imho, this would be a real event if either of the designs were good. But I don't see how anyone can say they even reach the lavel of good. My 7 year old neice said the design looked old fashioned.
i'm on the same tip as kissy- at first i thought he had no case, but after seeing those images AND childs' name clearly on his jury comments right NEXT to the image he ripped off of him, its really hard to see childs getting out of this without being burned somewhere.
the similarity is actually significant. the structure in this case IS integral with the aesthetic of the building. yeah- its a twisting mundane design, but they're splitting mirrored images using almost even the same spacing for the diamond grid structural system.
the kid may not win the case, but someone's going to get reamed for the ripoff....
Ted,
1) I am definitely not Tom Shine. With a story of this magnitude and profile, Tom Shine will surely have a larger media outlet to present his case than Archinect. I am just another student who happened to be attending Yale during Tom Shine’s last year there. Access to the posted images is from public documents: the 1999-2000 Yale School of Architecture and the A.P. wire service.
2) you ask, “shouldnt universities be the source and think tank for architects to view for inspiration? afterall practices like skids and their foundation give thousands per year to fellowships in addition to supporting programs directly?â€Â
“Inspiration†maybe, but I don’t know of any place in academia that condones plagiarism as part of their educational model.
And I hope you are not proposing bribery as an institutional fund-raising model. A few $10,000 travel checks do not buy architecture firms legal immunity. Should a firm want to “borrow†a students talents and abilities, most firms are a much smarter than SOM and David Childs-they usually hire the students they want. At the very least the students/ workers are compensated, be it in a small way, for their time and ideas. In this case, SOM and David Childs simply stole an idea from a student and presented it as their very own. That is plain wrong. The comparative images speak for themselves.
As Kissy_face said, “mr. childs has some explaining to do. He straight up jacked his shit!â€Â
Mies would have made a killing if this case had set a precedent a 100 years ago. Last time I was walking around New York City drunk, I thought every building was the Seagram building.
Suture,
unfortunately, images alone dont make a case for 'theft' of an idea as i believe there are prescedents out there that are the basis for both design directions. i would anticipate the basis of the case will be copyright and shine's own direct 'authorship' will be put on trial particularly if a written thesis places the relavance of the design idea within a broad or specific reference.
i am not saying that because of a foundation, it gives skids or any firm / individual carte blance to nick this and that. we [the profession] rely on institutions to pursue research and ideas in speculative / experimental venues as most in the real world cant pursue research within the meager fees the field offers. every project i start, i constantly read, look, read to get reinspired. am i stealing buildings, no. building upon those thoughts and threads, yes.
skids is a bottom up office; the so called brillant ideas generally come from below the partner who tends to be a design manager[sic] at best [management is not skids strong point]. over the last 3-5 years, skids has almost exclusive recuited from the best of the ivies for designers [or at least tried]. i would look to possibly a yale cronie to shine who worked on the project for skids who would have taken the time and effort to bring blindly the inspiration to the project [or at least the public docs]. i think childs directly, being full of himself, would not think any students work was worthy of his signature. its just the way skids works.
DAVID M. CHILDS: It’s a very beautiful shape. You took the skin and developed it around the form- great!
ALEXANDER D. GARVIN: It is totally different no mater where you are, because of the surface modules, which is oddly contextual.
PAUL GOLDBERGER: can you tell us al little about the base and the entrance?
-----
.. at this point DC said he was gonna take a piss and left the area. he was seen as he was placing a call to his office,
"we've been hijacked".
so, could it be the other way around?
then again, like the old chess wisdom,
"every move has been done before".
the whole thing (WTC) is an excellent feature film material. b.pitt as shine, anthony hopkins as childs, libeskind playing himself and featuring Patrick Markesano as the judge.
IT IS THEFT
AND THE DESIGNS ARE THE STUDENTS NOT THE SCHOOLS.
now that i think about it, did anyone ever sign anything saying there work was property of the schools they were in? according to this train of thought, someone could technically start making claims to all sorts of things like say... your soul. i say your sould is mine, therefore it is.
seriously, what validity is there to a school claiming your work as its property if you never agree to it? if you ended up getting money for something you designed in school, could they really lay claim to that? sure, they should have rights to post your work, but until the day my school shows me where i signed over all rights to my work, its mine.
abra, the movie thing is a great idea....but maybe you should start a thread to get the full script written....
oh man some of us architects can be such pompos assholes - yes even i hate childs, but -
how the hell can someone even think that a 'twisted structural grid with textured glass' can be like a unique patented idea???
its really stupid when people compare their formal investigations to nobel-prize winning scientific ideas
such people just increase the bad rap architects get in the industry
without the curtain wall.
yeah, now shine can sue calatrava
shit man..i might get involve in this, per; undisclosed 'tower' detail.
lawyer buddy called me just now about the said detail he has seen in my office. I, might get a piece o the pie..
t-shirts on me..
If libeskind hadnt pushed so hard for the statue of liberty image there would be no spire on top.
There was a full documentary over here on the whole saga a few months back.
Really sad to see the SOM guys playing around with different shaped spires (or toothpicks) standing back and admiring the complete lack of anything.
The whole thing is a heap of very messy messiness.
From Libeskinds wedge of light idea, which didnt work then got turned around and backed out, to the SOM takeover.
My guess is that SOM might try and settle. Its not going to be a quiet thing though and I think Shine will try and push it as far as he can, maybe too far, which will lead to a big court with the verdict being case waste of money that should be donated to something more meaningful.
AFH for example.
Sure its an important site, and maybe thats why the hawks are circling, but what happens to the memories.
Soon we are going to have group/mass law suits from relatives suiing for the lack of architectural integrity Witnesses who graduated from Yale in 1999 testifying, and Libeskind standing in the corner thinking thank fuck they didnt notice that I ripped the freedom tower idea from an architectural student in Frankfurt from 1998 who was a designing an olympic tower for the Berlin Olympics in 1942.
And all the time the martians will just be laughing at us!
This is some sorry assed shit, but its damn funny.
however. I still dont understand why the olympics need a 1776 ft tower?
is that for the extreme free diving event, or is paragliding going to be an olypic sport in 2012???
Not to sound supercilious but you misspelled "pompos."
And indeed it would be pompous for anyone to assume a patent on the twist. Chubby Checker could sue many people many times over and around till he fell over dizzy.
Calatrava’s example cited above is an excellent comparison and only serves to highlight the extreme extents that David Childs went to in order to create an exact facsimile of the original Tom Shine design.
Calatrava has BORROWED the public domain idea of a twisty tower. His tower does indeed twist AND the model distinctly articulates each ‘vertebrae’ of the spine-cum-skyscraper as groupings of floors so that it looks completely unique to the Shine design. Calatrava had the ethics, self-respect, decency and above all else the architectural TALENT to make the twist his own- it’s a Calatrava twist on the twist if you will. And it’s a nice tower.
The Photoshop bottom/top side/side comparison of a Shine to Calatrava design would not hold up. They are distinct. We have 2 nice yet different towers.
On the other hand, David Childs has copied not only the twist and presented it as his own,
but the facade,
as well as the structure,
then the entry,
also the baying,
uses the language...
…at what point if any has David Childs stopped his slavish mimicry of the original Tom Shine design?
The side by side Photoshop suturing of the Shine to SOM knock-off is peculiarly uncanny.
At minimum should David Childs, having been present at the final review where he saw the Shine design, admit to being influenced by the Tom Shine Design? His commentary sure suggest he was quite fond of the design from the second he saw it.
Give credit where credit is due. There are 3 towers and only one looks different. Sesame Street pick the one out that looks different and presto we have two Towers. I don’t think this is what anyone meant when they asked that the Twin Towers be rebuilt
suture.
good plan.
two towers.
one for Childs one for Shine.
That probably means the memorial gets ditched.
funnily reminds me of King Solomon.
Who's gonna let go before the kid gets ripped in half
i still think the Richard Linklater buffalo plan was the best thing to come out of all this
one point on your reference to Calatrava design. Calatrava's design is dervied directly from a sculpture he composed in the past which the developer convinced Calatrava to design a building based on this concept
Or so the story goes...
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.