This past Wednesday, Robert Scarano Jr. was barred from filing building permits in the city of New York, as it was decided that he had intentionally misled the Department of Buildings in order to gain approvals for often grossly over-scaled housing projects. This fraud was achieved through the production and certification of phonies: architectural plans that appeared to follow the rule of the law on paper, but which took advantage of ambiguities in the building code to increase building floor areas.

Scarano achieved the phony by utilizing common architectural elements in uncommon ways. In the past, mezzanines were not counted towards the floor area ratio of a building, as long as they were labeled as storage spaces. It was easy enough for Scarano to convince developers that a storage mezzanine, in plan, could function as a living room in practice, when it resulted in a substantial increase in the gross built area of a building lot, and profits. As a result, Scarano’s buildings are often much larger in scale than the urban fabric that surrounds them. The deception that is so easy to conceal on paper becomes impossible in the skyline: the buildings given a voice, confess to their own crimes.

E. Sean Bailey

A Swedish writer named Frederik Colting, who goes by the pen name J. D. California, wrote and published the book 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. The Colting book acquaints readers with a 76-year-old character named “Mr. C”., who is presumed to be an elderly version of Salinger’s iconic character Holden Caulfield. Salinger sued Colting for plagiarism in 2009, and succeeded in getting a court order which indefinitely bans the publication, advertising or distribution of the book in the United States.

In an article published on TMN, responding to the lawsuit against David Childs and SOM’s Freedom Tower, the author Clay Risen investigates the difference between some of the more common cases of plagiarism, like Salinger’s from the literary world, and the more difficult cases involving architecture. According to Risen:

A paragraph in a biography of George Washington, for example, that reads the same word for word as a paragraph from a previous biography of the first president is solid evidence of theft. A book’s value is decided in large part by the accumulated impressions gained from reading it; therefore, if part of the book was written by someone else, its author has rigged the reader’s appreciation of their work. But architectural appreciation works differently, more holistically. The vast majority of people, inside and out of the profession, judge a building by the sum of its parts to the near exclusion of its individual elements.

As Risen, and many others, have suggested that phonies in the context of architecture are not necessarily a bad thing. There may be authenticity beyond, simply an homage, that lies within an architectural sequel. This approach may result in a new whole made of copied elements which are displaced and re-contextualized as they never have been.

Erandi de Silva

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