Laboratoire d'invention architectonique (LIA)

The Laboratoire d'invention architectonique or LIA explores new articulations of informational capitals, new ways of constellating old stars in the night sky and new ways of talking with old masters. If architecture is the art of joining, then architectonics is all that pertains to this art. To formulate this in French, one would say that architecture is l'art de la liaison, employing the substantive form of the verb lier. If one wants to bridge the past and present in French, the verb would at one point take the form lia.

-Rework the previous sentence to make it about including a third.

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The simple past tense activates the past in the present, tells a story as if it is happening in the present and yet it marks grammatically its link to an absent past. Like stars in the night sky whose light is the only access we have to a distant and perhaps extinct celestial body, the roots of that which circulates today in our symbol-rich world remain inaccessible and hidden, as if encrypted. However, we are confronted with an obstacle: We know neither the alphabet nor the key to unscramble it. We must invent them both. Invention implies a "coming in" (in + venire in its etymology). It is neither created nor designed; neither fabricated nor made up. It is more a hunt in which one must learn to imitate that which one is hunting. At the LIA, we are interested in thinking architecture like this: as an art of joining whose practitioners build their skills through an iterative form of architectonic invention.