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ARChITECTURE AND ITS DOUBLE BRUCE BÉGOUT 177
anything original by themselves, therefore lacking imagination, or to be seeking – through parody – to mock the work they are revisiting and somehow caricaturing. It’s a kind of imitation that cannot actually avoid eliciting a smile. Citation is successful insofar as it takes advantage of this gap with regard to the original work’s horizon of expectations. The disappointment of not seeing that a copy is thus accompanied by an ironic compensation which turns weakness into a parodic gesture. But this is not always the case; pastiche may have nobler intentions, such as recognition. Quite often, pastiche-makers place themselves in a position of inferiority, paying homage to the model they are revisiting. The boundary between reverential imitation – long a staple of Western artistic education – and pastiche may be rather thin.
It’s not clear whether the worldwide trend for reproductions of pre-existing buildings is connected to our pastiche age; its point of departure – i.e., at the beginning of the urban, industrial age, leaving aside Renaissance imitations of Antiquity – was originally an attitude of devotional admiration. The life-size replication of a well-known architecture was permissible as a way of somehow tapping its aura, its symbolic power, through a sort of geographical as well as mental transfer of its glory. Thus architectural signs travel too; imaginaries are transferred across continents. Just as a plant may cross the ocean attached to a piece of wooden flotsam, and then find a spot to grow in an island far away from its birth soil, generating a new species, similalrly, cultural features may travel through the seas of history and colonise other territories like weeds. Numerous buildings in modern republics have almost exactly replicated ancient ones in order to accrue this supplement of legitimacy. Court houses, parliaments, and universities have plagiarised ancient architecture in order to acquire a patina of history and grandeur. Reference was reverence. It sanctified the past even as it tried to elevate the present. In a certain sense, this replication regime still partakes of Nietzsche’s “grand style” as described in Twilight of the Idols:
Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms — now persuading, even flattering, now only commanding. The highest feeling of power and sureness finds expression in a grand style. The power which no longer needs any proof, which spurns pleasing, which does not answer lightly, which feels no witness near, which lives oblivious of all opposition to it, which reposes within itself, fatalistically, a law among laws — that speaks of itself as a grand style.
In recent times, architectural reproduction is ostensibly carried out in accordance with different criteria. It’s no longer a question of absorbing the model’s value into the copy, but rather the goal is to simply play with that value. Certain amusement parks, such as France Miniature in Elancourt, offer us samples of world-renowned buildings, around which the tourists walk, like drunken Gullivers, under the impression that they are travelling. The widespread thematization of entertainment architecture also resorts to this play of references. Casino hotels in Las Vegas or Macao simulate cities, monuments, or architectural wonders (Paris, Venice, New York, Angkor Vat, etc) not simply in order to receive a sacred unction of glamour (no one is fooled by the trompe l’œil, and the engineers’ borderline-pathological pursuit of realism never manages to elicit more than a slight amazement), but with the aim of creating an immediately recognisable perceptual universe. The über-urbanites’ brains are saturated with images and information to such a degree – nearly to the point of cognitive