ABSTRACT
Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s School of Architecture at the University of Houston, completed in 1986, is a copy. More specifically, it is a copy of an unbuilt project by French neoclassical architect Claude Nicholas Ledoux for the ideal town of Chaux. The fact that the building is a copy – which has produced almost universal derision among architectural historians and critics – is taken here as an intellectural starting point rather than a dead end. The chapter looks not only at the ways in which Johnson and Burgee’s building adheres to and deviates from Ledoux’s earlier work, it also considers other “copies” in Johnson’s oeuvre – notably his House at New Canaan of 1950 – as well as other “versions” of Ledoux to argue for an expanded consideration of the unoriginal in architecture.
