ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way in which modern architecture and copyright law co-evolved. Modern architecture’s reproduction, seriality and export were enabled and regulated by copyright law, while copyright law evolved to respond to emerging technological challenges. The first part of the chapter discusses a number of legal case studies from the early twentieth century that demonstrate how new copyright regulations appear exactly at the moment when new architectural practices emerge, and how they interact with them. The second part of this chapter examines a number of theoretical questions concerned with copyright regulations as they are challenged by contemporary modes of architectural production and preservation. New architectural scanning and printing technologies, as well as artificial intelligence and computer-generated design, are at the frontier of the concept of authorship and ownership; they challenge received notions to do with the legal afterlife of creative work and of copyright as the right of humans over objects.
