The symbiotic hypothesis

ECOLOGY, ARCHITECTURE, PHILOSOPHY
International Symposium
Thursday 6 and Friday 7 November 2025
Cité de l’Architecture, Paris
Call for papers (PDF)

Presentation

Human settlement, through its lifestyles and cultures of
urban development, is today weighing on the planet to
the point of destroying, at an alarming rate, the amenities
of the Earth system and the possibility of a habitable
future.
This mechanism of desolation and atrophy of living
environments worries and mobilizes us: it engages us in
an intellectual project that requires intense synergies
between disciplines. This symposium aims to mobilize
three of them – ecology, architecture and philosophy –
around this symbiotic hypothesis.
How can we better understand and contribute to
mutually beneficial relationships between forms of life
(their organizations, their material and social
foundations) which, however different, share
interdependencies, vulnerabilities and decisive vitalities?
It’s a material, relational, cultural and theoretical issue,
and a multi-disciplinary one at that. It’s also part of the
paradigmatic shifts emerging around the new
environmental and ecological humanities.
The notion of symbiosis allows us to examine, in the
light of their possible mutual benefits, the skills of links
and organizations that living beings invent in intimate and
lasting ways. It opens the way to investigations and offers
insights and reflections on the diversity of heterospecific
interactions, enabling us to better understand the diversity
of temporal frameworks, the shared benefits, as well as
the rivalries of current associations.
We propose to explore this symbiotic hypothesis from
the point of view of architecture – an inviting power, but
also a discipline which, in its own ethics, is even more
concerned today than in the past with its own
potentiality of destruction. Three thematic sessions of
questions will enable us to take a cross-disciplinary
approach.

SESSION 01
New relationality at work?
Relational thinking in architecture

SESSION 02
Materialities and immaterialities reconsidered?
Rethinking our uses of and links to the world’s
material presences

SESSION 03
A booming discipline and profession?
Ecology as the arkhè of architecture

Read the full description of the sessions in the Call for papers (PDF)

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

This call for papers is addressed to:

• architects, urbanists and landscape designers who wish to
  present their work and share their reflections,
• teachers and researchers who are engaged with these topics
  through their courses and/or research,
• philosophers who see in architecture an opportunity to deepen
  their own thinking about these topics and their relevance.

Please send proposals for papers (maximum 300 words in
French or in English, before 25 March 2025) to the following
address: secretariatgerphau@gmail.com,
Presentations will be given or in French or in English.

SCHEDULE

Call for papers: December 20, 2024
Submission deadline for proposal abstracts: March 15, 2025
Shortlist of speakers: May 15, 2025
Full paper submission deadline (between 15,000 and 25,000
characters): September 15, 2025
Date of symposium: November 6 and 7, 2025

SCIENTIFIC COUNCIL

Céline Bodart, architect, Lecturer ENSA Paris la Villette,
GERPHAU, Xavier Bonnaud, architect, Professor ENSA Paris la
Villette, GERPHAU, Stéphane Bonzani, Architect-PhD in
Philosophy, Professor ENSA Clermont-Ferrand, RESSOURCES,
Fabienne Brugère, Philosopher, Professor, Paris 8, Christine
Carboni, Vice-director, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine,
Olivier Gaudin, Philosopher, Professor, Cole de la nature et du
paysage de Blois, Xavier Lagurgue, Architect, Professor, ENSA
Paris la Villette, GERPHAU, Nathalie Machon, Professor of
Urban Ecology at the Natural History Museum, Torsten
Schröder, Architect, Professor at TU Eindhoven, CESCO, Maëlle
Tessier, Architect, Professor at ENSA Nantes, GERPHAU, Dimitri
Toubanos, Architect, Lecturer ENSA Paris val de Seine, EVCAURéseau
ECO, Philippe Villien, Lecturer ENSA Paris Belleville,
IPRAUS-Réseau ENSA ECO, David Vandenburgh, Architect,
Professor Emeritus University of Leuven, Chris Younès,
Philosopher, Professor ESA-Paris, GERPHAU

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Xavier Bonnaud, Xavier Lagurgue, Maëlle Tessier, Younès Chris,
Baptiste Boleys, Axel Decat, Florence Taché

CONTACT

secretariatgerphau@gmail.com