ABSTRACT
Architecture displays the individual and collective values involved in its inhabitation, construction, procurement and design. It traces the thinking of the individuals who have participated in it, their relationships and their involvement in the cultures where they lived and worked. This chapter looks at three contemporary replica buildings as media for fabricated messages for cultural consumption. The first building is the current project to ‘reconstruct’ the Ottoman-era barracks in Taksim Square in Istanbul as a shopping mall, replacing the important Gezi Park in an attempt to claim an imperial Ottoman identity for contemporary Turkey. The second project is the recent ‘reconstruction’ of the centre of Dresden, Germany, in service of disaster tourism and the idea of the reinstatement of a historical continuity between the present and the pre-1945 past. The third is Studio Libeskind’s shopping mall called Crystals at CityCenter in Las Vegas. The shopping mall is a replication of an architectural language first developed at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. As such it expresses the phenomenon for ‘starchitecture’, where famous designers are hired to reproduce forms for their international sign value. These three replica buildings show how in an age of globalisation architecture can yield political messages spanning the fields of work, history, education and economic markets, over and above the ideas that the architects and promoters of these buildings initially intended.
