The copied was the Wangjing SOHO Beijing office complex, which has been under construction since 2011. Its copy is being realized in Chongqing, and the “pirates” work very quickly, therefore, most likely, they will complete their facility before the original, which will open in 2014.
The developer of the Beijing building, SOHO China, is a very influential company with billions of dollars in turnover (among its properties is also the "Great Wall Commune"), but even it is unlikely to be able to do anything about copyright infringers. The legislation protecting them in the PRC is poorly developed and protects mainly the "artistic component", which in the case of architecture is often difficult to separate from the functional.
According to lawyers, it will be possible to prove the fact of illegal copying in court, but it is unlikely that it will be possible to force the "pirates" to demolish their building: the case will be limited to a fine. However, the lawbreakers themselves, Chongqing Meiquan, deny the similarity of the Chongqing building to the Beijing one: according to them, they were inspired not by the work of Hadid, but by the shape of the pebbles on the banks of the Yangtze.
Initially, Zaha Hadid reacted to the fact of "cloning" her project calmly, noting that such copies in the future may lead to the emergence of interesting "mutations". However, later a representative of her bureau expressed the opposite opinion, demanding to demolish the Chongqing "double" - obviously under the influence of developers.
It should be noted that copying buildings is a usual thing for China, although before that, as a rule, traditional European architecture was a model. So, the UNESCO site of the city of Hallstatt in the Austrian Alps and the English Dorchester were completely copied. Also in the 1990s, a "clone" of the chapel in Ronchamp was built, but the Le Corbusier Foundation later achieved its demolition.
But now the situation has changed. The reason for the situation when all projects published on the Internet or in magazines turn out to be objects of potential (and mass) copying is in the unprecedented scale of construction in China, where there are not enough architects to meet the demand of developers for projects. Moreover, the pace of this construction is such that there is simply no time to develop projects using the “usual” method, so there is only an illegal way out of the situation.
