On Limits and Passages:
A Philosophical Perspective on Synergies in Architectural Research

Thinking about synergies in architectural research is a big challenge. More than the articulation of different disciplines, it supposes the confrontation of heuristic cohabitations not only between disciplines but between different practicing and thinking milieus. As Edgar Morin, who has been much engaged in inventing new ways of thinking about complexity, outlined “the discipline is an organizational category at the heart of scientific knowledge; it establishes the division and the specialization of work and responds to the diversity of fields covered by the sciences. Although part of a much larger scientific whole, a discipline tends naturally towards autonomy, through the delimitation of its boundaries, the language that it develops, the techniques that it creates or uses, and potentially through its own theories.”[1] In the development of the sciences, disciplinary rigor and specialization proved fruitful in delimiting the domains, the objects of study necessary to determine a given form of knowledge and avoid its dissolution—a prerequisite for encounters with other disciplines. Articulating different disciplines does not signify that there is no differentiation between them, but rather an inter-fertilization that transcends the respective disciplinary frontiers.

But the “transdisciplines” and “indisciplines” go beyond interdisciplinarity; they consist in seeking other forms of relationship, of co-dynamics. They call for a reassessment of boundaries and transitions, not to simplify the notions of limits but to complicate them. Derrida calls upon a “limitrophy,” rethinking the potentialities of the culture of limit: “[I]t will concern what sprouts or grows at the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply.”[2] It helps to think about questions of connections between the inside and outside, the public and private, the human and non-human, under the dual pressure of a resulting fear for the world and from a sense of responsibility. Western modernity in Modern Times came to oppose humankind and nature, following the dualistic representation outlined in the 17th century by Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes of a nature outside human beings, which they could manipulate at will. The way we see things—and the paradigms through which we interpret them—has evolved. This process began in the second half of the 20th century with philosophers such as Hans Jonas whose work The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age,[3] links thought about human destiny to the human relationship with nature, or Michel Serres’ The Natural Contract,[4] which advocates not only—as in Rousseau’s “social contract”—the conditions of agreement between humans, but also those of respect for nature (giving back to the natural environment what has been taken from it, and more).

The terms limits and passages are directly associated. The word limit is “borrowed from Latin limes, limitis, a lane bordering a domain, a path between two fields, a limit, a border.”[5] It refers to the fringes, those of the knowable and unknowable, of the finite and infinite, of order and chaos, of permanency and instability, human and non-human, life and death. The philosopher Henri Maldiney explains: “Traversing corresponds to this Indo-European root per, à travers, meaning ‘through’, and to the word experience, such as the Greek expeira and others derived from German. The Greek poros, meaning ‘passage’, refers to both a path and a ford, allowing one to pass from here to there, across the line or zone of union and separation that fundamentally defines the most primitive of human situations.”[6]

“A boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.”[7] This means that limits are paradoxical: in the same moment, they sometimes separate, distinguish and sometimes create relations, thus revealing themselves to be surpassed and transgressed. Thus, limits are places of transformation and encounter. In this regard, certain voices stand out, for example that of Michel Serres, who contends that passages and links establish relations between new scientific practices and the domains of the fluctuating, the composite and the hybrid. According to Serres, it’s a matter of considering fields and disciplines as “[a] continuum [that] is the seat of movements and exchanges: methods, models, results circulate everywhere inside it, exported or imported from every place to everyplace . . . the new spirit develops into a philosophy of transport: intersection, intervention, interception . . . In other words, the partitioning is less important than the circulation along the paths or fibers; the circumscription of a region is less of interest than the confluence nodes of the lines, nodes that are, according to the thesis, regions themselves. In this new space, invention develops according to an ars interveniendi; intersection is heuristic, and progress is intertweaving; this is how complexity is explained.”[8] And so, a dualistic imaginary that oriented a certain sort of modernism is being overlaid by that of a symbiosis and resourcing.

Facing climate change, biodiversity collapse, globalization, and social and technical transformations, architecture needs vital research that connects academia, practice, education, experimentation and culture. This means a diversity of public, private and social stakeholders. So, synergies are re-sourcing for architectural research in different subtopics: such as instability – dealing with uncertainty; dealing with vulnerabilities; dealing with caring. Researching within synergic milieus considers balance between nature and artifacts, between ecosystems and anthropization, between machines and human beings, between practice and thought: it calls for paradigmatic changes in the ways of apprehending relationships between milieus, rationality, sensibility and empathy. It refers to the epistemological and ethical positions expressed in other types of narratives and methods of re-sourcing put into practice. In Les trois écologies, for example, Félix Guattari insists on the need for an ecosophy, in other words, “an ethico-political articulation . . . between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity).[9] In Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, Val Plumwood explains that (too much) science has become a “form of monological and dualistic thinking, [where scientists] set themselves radically apart from objects of knowledge in a way that refuses objects elements of commonality, mind, or intentionality.”[10] Or, in Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture[11] Hélène Frichot highlights the dirtiness of material and conceptual relationships within complex environments, emphasizing feminist theories and practices, and exploring the possibilities of maintaining a creative ecology of practices in architectural research.

Returning to the theme of limits and passages, and of troubling and re-sourcing synergies in architectural research, the challenge is to imagine, to invent and to experiment with novel scientific perspectives, alliances and dialogues, through new areas of research,[12] and methods and tools of cognitive and creative dynamics.

[1]Edgar Morin, “Sur l’interdisciplinarité,” Carrefour des sciences, Actes du Colloque du Comité National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris, 1990), accessed December 3, 2025, https://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/bulletin/b2c2.php (Trans. C.Y.)

[2] Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York, 2008), 29.

[3] Hans Jonas, Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago, 1984).

[4] Michel Serres The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor, 1995).

[5] Alain Ray, ed., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris, 2006), 2027. (Trans. C.Y.)

[6] Henri Maldiney qtd. in Chris Younès, Philippe Nys and Michel Mangematin, “A l’écoute de Henri Maldiney,” in Ibid. L’architecture au corps (Brussels 1997), 13. (Trans. C.Y.)

[7] See Martin Heidegger, „Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951) in Ibid.: Poetry, Language, Thought (New York, 1971), 145–161, esp.154.

[8] Michel Serres, Hermes II: Interference, trans. Randolph Burks, (Minneapolis and London, 2025), 2.

[9] Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, (London and New Brunswick, NJ, 2000), 28.

[10] Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture. The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London and New York, 2002), 45.

[11] Hélène Frichot, Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (Baunach, 2019).

[12] See Céline Bodart and Chris Younès, “Les synergies à l’œuvre pour faire recherche en architecture,” Le Philotope 14 (2020).