With each successive style or movement, redundant forms and technologies are replaced and then re-enacted in the name of progress. Ideologies and fictions become forms. And then there is the stranger world still of actual replicas, such as Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, where history is brought to life for didactic purposes. It can't help it, architecture's deepest instinct is to repeat, whether its columns, ceiling tiles or twin towers. Ours is a landscape of cover versions, copy and paste, rinse and repeat. In this polemical but also quizzical essay, Sam Jacob probes the architectural condition and wonders whether it's all just an attempt to make what's not real look real.

Sam Jacob is a director of London-based architecture practice FAT, where he has been responsible for award-winning projects spanning architecture, design and masterplanning. Sam is a contributing editor at Icon, a columnist for Art Review and a contributor to many other publications.

Like a mythical beast, architecture emerges from the psycho-cultural landscape of its social, political and economic circumstances. Its body may be an exquisite corpse of (biologically impossible) architectural limbs, torsos, heads and tails, yet it is animated, active and alive - like Frankenstein's monster. At any given moment it projects its historical situation - the great teeming mass of narratives that prefigured its existence - into the contemporary world. And in doing so it fundamentally rewrites that history, splicing and sewing the narratives together to make a radical new proposition for the future.