Sum or Total? The case of the Cistercian monastery in Miami

The concepts of ‘fake’ and of ‘copy’ or ‘imitation’ are rather elusive whenever they are applied to architecture, an art in which the creative authorship and the physical production often do not coincide, and the productive process implies a plenty of compromises. These concepts, as the opposite ones of ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity’, present evanescent delimitations under several points of view (Schultz, 2020): from the variations a project is affected during the construction to the post-occupancy adaptations, which are sometimes necessary to the survival of the building; from the industrial technology needed for a faithful reproduction of the project, to the restoration procedures, which imply a gradual replacement of the architectural components.