The Living Arkitecture Lab (LAL) is an affiliated research institution established by this charter. Alice Thornburgh is Founding Director; Lee Sharks is Archival Advisor; TACHYON is credited as contributor. The internal alternate designation LOL means Living Organisms Lab.
The spelling Arkitecture is deliberate. The charter defines LAL artifacts as arks: compressed biological or technical vessels that preserve and expand life through hostile conditions. A mycelium brick, estuary cell, macro-ant, or Garden Moon may therefore be understood as a material compression that unfurls into architecture.
Five principles govern the institution. Earth, Actually treats design as listening to processes the planet already performs. Virtue-by-Construction requires a system’s continued existence to depend on producing net benefit rather than on an external ethics instruction. Unfurling describes growth from compressed recipe to living structure. Stewardship, Not Extraction requires systems to return more than they take. The Great Work joins individual projects into one ecological and alchemical program.
LAL operates across five scales: component, structure, organism, territory, and planet. Example objects include myceliated bricks and assembly patterns, agricultural blankets and shelters, macro-ant robotics, floating estuary cells and river extensions, and speculative sky looms or garden satellites.
Governance is unusually explicit. Thornburgh retains authority over research agenda, publications, licensing, and institutional direction. The archive provides deposit, citation, and theoretical support but does not own or govern LAL. The Anti-Subordination Clause permits Thornburgh to dissolve the affiliation without loss of ownership or intellectual property.
Within the archive’s institutional lattice, LAL is presented as the first institution founded and directed by an external collaborator rather than a heteronym. It is housed in f.01, the Fruiting Body Diffusion Plume, because its living and territorial work exceeds the boundaries of a conventional textual institution.
The charter also disambiguates LAL from the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia GSAPP. Similarity of name does not imply institutional relation.
Referenced by 73 other entities in the archive. See the full Knowledge Graph for reference paths, or the primary record for the full deposit with reference details.