A former architectural student sued the designers of the World Trade Center site's planned Freedom Tower on Monday, saying designs for the skyscraper mirror those he created at Yale University...Thomas Shine, of Brookline, Mass., is seeking unspecified damages in federal court in Manhattan for what he said was the theft of his designs...The lawsuit alleged that the Freedom Tower was "strikingly similar" to Shine's designs for a Manhattan building for the proposed 2012 Olympic Games in New York...Childs saw the designs when he served in 1999 on a panel of jurists invited by the Yale School of Architecture to evaluate the students' work.
See for yourself.
Coincidentally I know someone who considered bringing a lawsuit against the same people for the same reason, perhaps an indication that SOM borrows heavily from student work or that high-rise architecture, by necessity, creates repetition in design, even by different parties. Because of the latter (the first may be true but would be difficult to prove) and the limitations of architectural copyright, this case probably won't have a chance. But looking at those images, one hopes SOM acknowledges their fault and provides some retribution, if the charges are well-founded.
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