Is there a universal architecture of systems that change the very idea of building, which essentially is a matter of defying gravity, to a matter of omitting it? Konrad Wachsmann`s universal wedge connector, invented in the shadow of the world war, and applied in the General Panel System in collaboration with Walter Gropius in the US in 1941, was the point of departure of the Bauhaus Lab 2018. The international participants investigated the historical context and discourses of transatlantic postwar modernism, shaped by the complex dynamics of colonialism, industrialization, consumerism, educational reforms, and war. “The Art of Joining” is a critical examination of contemporary and historical claims of universality around the notion of “the standard” bundled in the metal connector.