introduction et inter-duction; les règles du jeu.

The international conference « encore l'architecture – encore la philosophie » is an initiative of the GERPHAU lab, research group for Philosophy, Architecture, Urban (Architecture School of Paris La Villette, UMR 7218 CNRS-Lavue), in partnership with Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, UMR-Lavue (Laboratoire Architecture, Ville, Urbanisme, Environnement) and philAU (a scientific thematic network : Philosophy, Architecture, Urban). This conference is the first ARENA conference (Architectural Research in Europe Network Association), a shared platform that aims to promote, support, develop and disseminate high-quality research in all fields of architecture in the widest sense. The network already includes researchers from leading European architecture schools.

Synopsis.
In Paris in 1987, a first event was held to celebrate the meeting of two disciplinary fields, entitled “Mesure pour mesure, architecture et philosophie”. Architects and philosophers were invited to discuss together how philosophy could capture better what determines architecture itself. Now, on the occasion of a new international conference, the GERPHAU Lab seeks to restate and refresh the question of the meeting of architecture and philosophy, by asking: what still remains today of our cross-over practices? ENCORE L'ARCHITECTURE, ENCORE LA PHILOSOPHIE.

To build together these reflections about the future of our respective practices,
why don't we hold to the hypothesis that our recent histories, in architecture as well as philosophy,
could be written through the addition of a few prefixes?

In linguistics, a prefix does not only serve the formation of a new word: it also regenerates the question of the meaning of the word. It is a discursive invention and its real strength lies in its ability to engage a new type of relationship with the world. Re-, alter-, eco-, co-, bio-, etc., these prefixes have clung to both our discourses as well as our disciplines. But in what way do they question the meaning of our practices? In archi-tecture as in philo-sophy, how do these successive re-definitions put the fundamentals into question, and how do they disturb their alleged unity inherited from Ancient Greece? And, moreover, how does the over-use of prefixes help us to understand what still makes sense in philosophy, or what still makes sense in architecture? The key issue of this conference, ‘Encore l'architecture, Encore la philosophie’, will be to trace backwards the stream of architectural and philosophical ideas through the thematic of the prefix as constituting a form of narrative. The conference will aim to trace the paths of their development, and other influencing factors, so as to return to those meetings between architecture and philosophy which already have oriented, re-oriented and sometimes dis-oriented our speech. It will be a meeting at which we invite participants to retell the story of our disciplines in order to grasp what it is still unique today about our practices.