Du 17.02.2026
au 12.05.2026
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Discussions

This series of discussions invites us to listen to writers who construct fictional worlds, much like architects designing their projects. In doing so, they shift our perspective, interpret places differently, embody the movements of society, highlight contemporary challenges… and invent other possible worlds. These parallel spaces are territories of freedom: they allow us to imagine alternative arrangements. Whilst inventing potentials, projections and illusions, these narratives pay attention to reality: its protagonists, its places and its temporalities.

By giving a voice to those who write – through their perspectives, their practices, their imaginations – the series of discussions will then explore how literary fiction can help revitalise the architectural project. What are we looking at? Which characters take the stage? Which voices deserve to be heard? What do we make visible or invisible? Which scenes need to be composed?

As architects and future architects reflect on the meaning and possible futures of their discipline in a damaged world, can fictional writing serve as one of the architects’ design tools?

Confirmed guests

Tuesday 17 February at 1pm
Nina Leger, Mémoires sauvées de l’eau

Nina Leger is a novelist. Her latest novels are stories of places. Antipolis (Prix écrire la Ville) is the tale of a utopia; Mémoires sauvées de l’eau (Historical Novel Prize) follows the course of a Californian river from the gold rush to the mega-fires. In each case, the place is at the centre, not as a character, but as the very substance of the novel.

Nina Leger will share what this practice – writing about places – has taught her and the questions it raises.

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Tuesday 24 February at 1pm
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Règne animal

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is a writer. His novel Règne animal captivates through the temporal depth it opens up from a single location—a farm that sees successive generations of a family and a radical transformation in agricultural practices. The way the narrative intertwines living beings and human activities helps to renew our perspective on agricultural landscapes through the lens of contemporary ecological considerations.

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Tuesday 10 March at 1pm
Aurélien Bellanger, The Last Days of the Socialist Party

Aurélien Bellanger is a writer, philosopher, cyclist and cave explorer. His novels have placed the construction of space at the heart of fictional narratives, particularly within the Greater Paris area. In his novel, The Last Days of the Socialist Party, he explores the tensions between rural and urban worlds, which run through public debate and are embodied in spatial figures.

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Tuesday 17 March at 1pm
Joy Sorman, Le témoin

Joy Sorman is a writer, television columnist and radio presenter. In Le témoin, she offers an immersive exploration of a building, the TGI, which is both a republican institution and a contemporary monument that expresses the relationship our society maintains—or believes it maintains—with justice. The author’s literary work, particularly her precise use of the building’s various spaces, reveals what the space says about the social relationships that form within it.

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Tuesday 24 March at 1pm
Philippe Vasset, La Conjuration

Philippe Vasset is a journalist and writer. His novel La Conjuration depicts a remarkable quest for abandoned, hidden places on the fringes of the city. Following the journeys and discoveries of an urban explorer, this logbook offers a fresh perspective on contemporary ruins, derelict sites and wastelands, revealing their spatial power, their symbolism and their subversive dimension.

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Tuesday 7 April at 1pm
Ramsès Kefi, Four Days Without My Mother

Ramsès Kefi is a journalist and writer: he writes both true stories and fiction. His novel Four Days Without My Mother is set in a housing estate, La Caverne. A mother’s disappearance, the starting point of the plot, opens up numerous stories of emancipation and describes the settings for these journeys: from basements to rooftop terraces, from the city to the countryside, from one country to another…

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Tuesday 21 April at 1pm
Maylis de Kerangal, Jour de Ressac

The work of Maylis de Kerangal – publisher, novelist and short-story writer, winner of the 2010 Prix Médicis – focuses heavily on places and their transformation: a lake, a mine, the construction of a bridge, the reconstruction of a city. Jour de Ressac recounts the narrator’s return to Le Havre, which allows the character’s memories and those of the city to be explored in parallel. Memories, reconstructions, traumas: the novel is an investigation, a foray into the layers of the past.

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Tuesday 5 May at 1pm
Elisabeth Philippe

Architects engage in dialogue with architectural critics who offer interpretations to explain what is at stake in contemporary practice. Fiction writers also engage in dialogue with critics. Elisabeth Philippe is a literary critic on Le Masque et la Plume, the legendary radio programme created in 1955. She is also deputy head of the culture section at Le Nouvel Obs. She is familiar with the work of the writers who have visited ENSA Paris-Est in recent weeks to talk to us about the power of fiction. For this closing session of the “Fictions: Other Worlds” series, she will help us draw conclusions from these meetings by sharing her observations on the role of fiction in the world of books. So that architects can return from this literary detour with ideas to apply to their projects.

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The series curators

Gwenaëlle d'Aboville is an urban planner and architect, a graduate of the Master’s in Urban Planning at Paris I (2003) and the Paris La Villette School of Architecture (2023). She heads the urban planning agency Ville Ouverte, which she co-founded in 2005, and teaches as an associate lecturer at ENSA Paris Est as part of the DSA in urban architecture and the bachelor’s degree programme.

David Enon is an architect and urban planner, a graduate of the University of Paris-Sorbonne (2007) and the School of Architecture of the City and Territories (2011). He concurrently pursues research and writing projects whilst working as a practitioner in the role of project director at TVK. He has been teaching at ENSA Paris Est since 2017 as part of the Bachelor’s degree and the DSA in Architecture and Urban Planning.