Many architecture students (including myself) find it a little disappointing when they go into architecture school just to find out that at least most of first year is about copying rather than creating; you have to copy what you see and copy what other great architects have done before you. I use to hate this, but over the years I’ve come to understand how important that process was and how you need to learn how to copy well before you can do something of your own (unless you are a genius, in which case you can probably do whatever you like).

Apparently some people paid less attention than other during that first year, either that or they are completely unable to apply what they learned to other fields other than architecture. Such is the case of Per Linde, a Swedish architect living in London who founded the website combocompetitions.com.

I don’t know for how long this website has been running, but I just came across it today for the first time only to find that their current competition “poor but beautiful” is basically a mash-up of competitions we have already run at ARCHmedium.com. Take our “Rome Motorino Check Point” brief (http://en.archmedium.com/Concursos/RMCP/Summary.php), apply it to our “New York Theater City” site (http://en.archmedium.com/Concursos/End_NYTC/Results.php) and there you go! A bran new “original” architecture competition!

Come on… really? I’m all for competition (yes, we do organize competitions, the irony is not lost on me), but at least try to be original, otherwise it’s going to be hard to actually push architectural limits and challenge the architectural community to find new answers and solution to existing problems (which we all claim to be trying to do).

UPDATE

I was contacted by Per and after exchanging a few e-mails I have agreed to update this post with his view on this situation. For anyone who is interested, find his explanation below:

Hi Guillermo,

Thank you for the opportunity to address your comments.

It is understandable that you want to protect what you have created with ARCHmedium. While I appreciate the work you and your team have produced, I do want to emphasize that I haven’t used any of ARCHmedium’s competitions as a base for Combo Competitions’ briefs. This is evidently difficult to prove, but I sincerely believe that copying someone else’s success is not the way to further the architectural discourse.

One of the reasons for launching the Poor But Beautiful competition was to offer a competition that turned focus towards the typology of the parking garage building: its necessity in dense urban areas, paired with monetary neglect and the unwillingness to use its size and often prominent location as an advantage.

This is to be contrasted with ArchMedium’s Rome Motorino Check Point, which deals with traffic-related issues caused by illegally parked scooters. While both competitions concern parking, they do so in decidedly different ways.

When it comes to location it is important to clarify that the site of Poor But Beautiful is not the same as ARCHmedium’s Urban Theater Campus’. While both sites are indeed located in the Hudson Yards area of Manhattan, it would be a staggering task to sift through every existing competition to make sure a certain site and its surrounding areas have not been used before. Besides, it’s a well-known fact that the Hudson Yards area is currently being redeveloped, which by default makes it an architecturally interesting location universally.

I chose the site not only because of the current focus on and potential of the area (including attractions like the High Line and Madison Square Garden), but also because of it being a vacant plot of land on Manhattan, along with the general infatuation with cars in the US, and the inherent issues with the size of a parking garage structure located in a very dense urban area.

I hope this clarifies any misunderstandings.

Regards,
Per

iTunes is a pretty nice software if you ask me. Sure the last couple of versions have taken a few steps back in terms of design and usability, but overall it allows me to keep all my music (and I do have some good 7000 songs) organized, categorized, searchable and sync between my devices.

However I feel like there is something missing, nothing too complicated, just a “free tag” field.

iTunes already uses tags, or categories, or however you want to call them, but they are predetermined by the program. For each song you can use tags such as “artist”, “album” or “genre”.

Music though is much more than an artist with a certain style recording an album. At least for me music is the soundtrack to my life. Each moment, each party, each journey I make, person I know or even season in the year can be associated with a different soundtrack, and listening to those soundtracks allows me to travel back to that place or time when I first heard that song or when I shared it with someone I care of.

It would be great if iTunes allowed you to simply tag song with whatever you wanted, thing like “new year’s eve 2009”, “summer in India”, “grandma” or whatever phrase you wanted to tag it with and that will allow you to search those song and listen to them whenever you want to remember those occasions.

Sure you could build a playlist for each occasion, person you know, journey you take and season of the year, but that wouldn’t end up not being very useful when you start having hundreds if not thousands of playlists…

I won’t say a lot of people do, but definitely some people come to me from time to time saying they would like to start an internet business. They come looking for advice, most of them without an idea of what it is that they want to do, they only know they want to start something. (Not judging. That’s more than most people know about what they want to do with their lives!).

It’s easy though to get trapped in the stage of trying to come up with a cool idea. Days go by and frustrations starts to grow, making it even less likely that you will actually come across that great idea. So my advice is always to get started right away. Use that energy, that excitement that will only lasts so long to actually get something started.

“Ok but what do I start?” I usually hear next. Anything! Start a blog even. You think that’s too boring? Well then buy a clone of some website you like. Here’s where people usually starts to get all moral and judgmental. “But that’s copying” they usually say. “I want to do something original”, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for protecting intellectual property and I hate when I see literal rip-offs of a website or product, but let’s get some things clear:

  1. First. You must either code a clone yourself or buy it from someone who has already done the work. So all the code you’ll be using is legit, nothing is illegal, Facebook doesn’t own the right to all social networks the same way Pinterest doesn’t own the right to all photo sharing services (wait, isn’t Pinterest a social network too? I’m confused…)
  2. Second. Do you know how many well-known companies, those you admire and idolater were actually the first to come up with the concept that made them popular? Probably none. They all started bases on some other company’s idea or concept and took it from there or just executed it better.
  3. Third. Let’s say you decide to clone Facebook. No matter how good your clone is, even if it’s better than Facebook itself, let’s be realistic, you won’t be a thread to them, they have too much market share already for you even appear on their radar. So if you want to make something out of it you will have to develop your project into something else, focus on a very specialized niche, add something that makes you different, whatever it is. So at the end of the day you’ll need to come up with something of your own, a unique concept, the clone is just the starting point, not the final goal.

So yes, I’m all for using clones (sometimes), they’ll help you make progress quick in the beginning, which will get you even more excited about the project and make you want to work harder. In the end your flagship product will likely look little like the site you initially cloned or will even be a side project you started to promote your clone-based website. You never know were opportunity will come from, but you need to get started.