When it comes to work in countries outside the "Western world", often, among other difficulties that lie in wait for architects there, are called "contests", after which the project of the winners is implemented without their participation - by the efforts of the customers themselves. However, specific examples are rarely mentioned, so the case of the netzwerkarchitekten office in Darmstadt seems particularly revealing in this respect.
These German architects won an architectural competition in January 2003 to design Beijing's Da-Yan-Fan underground station, which was to be part of the fifth line leading from the city center to the Olympic Village in the north of the Chinese capital.
Soon, the station's project appeared - without mentioning the names of the authors - on the official website of the Beijing authorities, dedicated to the construction of Olympic facilities for the 2008 Games. Representatives of the organizers of the competition did not provide netzwerkarchitekten with any information about their further participation in the development of the project, but later, however, reported that their project was already included in the officially approved construction plan. The German architects did not succeed in meeting the Chinese planners, and, incidentally, they did not get the monetary prize they were entitled to. They consulted with a lawyer on the issue of judicial impact on the customers of the competition, consulted with representatives of the International Chamber of Commerce and the German Foreign Ministry, but this did not give any results.
As time went on, this year the architects of the netzwerkarchitekten found their work - already completed - in the landscape of Beijing via the Internet application Google Earth. After conducting their own investigation, they found out that Da-Yan-Fan station opened back in 2007. Moreover, if its appearance generally corresponds to the competition project, then those parts (especially in the interior of the building) that were not elaborated in detail in the preliminary proposal were - sometimes unexpectedly from the point of view of logic, according to the authors - supplemented by the Chinese side according to their own taste.
It should be noted that this story is not over yet: of course, the international litigation exceeds the financial capabilities of netzwerkarchitekten, but the Federal Chamber of Architects of Germany has now defended their interests, so justice - at least to some extent - may still prevail.
