Locations - Authenticity and Bogus Castles
A discussion of authenticity can lead down numerous lanes, and many are worth exploring.
Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida.
CC-BY-SA-3.0/MATT H. WADE AT WIKIPEDIA
In the field of architecture alone, there is a surprising number of ways to define authenticity, but one discussion inevitably comes to the fore: reproduction buildings. Certainly, creating simulacra and derivatives of previous forms is not a recent phenomenon. It was the almost universal approach of architects until the 19th century, since the familiarity of the forms tended to assure positive reactions to new buildings, at least among the people who mattered.
When my family visited a Florida theme park some years ago, we could not avoid visiting the central feature, which a guide described to us as a “castle” – a description that our six-year-old son immediately contested. Having spent almost all of his life in England he knew what a castle was, and it is made of stone, not fibreglass. To a child growing up in a place where real castles abound – often as formless ruins – the building material is a very important cue. Our sovn had experienced castles at child level, running around (and sometimes colliding with) the stone walls. A plastic castle would fail to conform to his particular personal exemplar. To a child growing up in North America, a continent with a conspicuous lack of real castles, the concept of castle would probably be gained from photographs, cartoons, television and video games, and would depend on the striking overall form. Such a child would be more likely to accept the false label attached to the fibreglass structure. In an instance like this, it is not just the “castle” label that creates inauthenticity, it also depends on how that label is interpreted by the individual.
My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines authenticity as “of undisputed origin; genuine,” which does not capture all of the architectural meanings, but it does hint at the problems raised by design reproduction. For example, the Tudoresque chair in our dining room is undisputedly and authentically early 20th century, in part because it lacks centuries of wear, but also because I don’t represent it as anything other than a reproduction. Hence, again, an object’s authenticity is not inherent in the object, but depends on the label we put on it, and the way that the label is perceived.
In investigations in Canada and the UK, I found that members of the wider population, when they are shown images of houses from their own area, are surprisingly good at detecting reproductions, regardless of the reproduction quality. In one experiment, 77.9 per cent of the 110 subjects correctly placed the authentic Victorian/Edwardian houses in the 1800 to 1925 era, while only 16.7 per cent assigned that range to the reproductions. One might presume that people are influenced by evidence of aging, such as normal deterioration, soiling and slight sags in the roof. However, when those same subjects analyzed the images more carefully, they tended to assign the same characteristics to both the real and reproduction houses. Factors, such as character, assigned prestige, impressiveness, and overall esteem were much the same for both authentic and reproduction houses.
This suggests that most people can detect reproductions in their built environments, but – with the possible exception of six-year-olds, and others who actively engage with the built environment – they are willing to accept them as reasonable substitutes for the real thing. Obviously more research is in order.