Call for Papers /// Specters of Architecture: The Negative Voices of the Project, 20–21 May 2026, ENSA Paris-Val de Seine and ENSA Paris-Malaquais, Paris, France

Specters of Architecture: The Negative Voices of the Project

Spectres de l'architecture, les voix négatives du projet

https://calenda.org/1321695

ABSTRACT

Architecture and infrastructures are inhabited by specters, which are traces of what has been, but also of what could have been, or what may one day come to be. We propose to read them through the lens of these specters, by paying as much attention to absences as to presences. This symptomatic approach encourages a focus on manifestations of projects, narratives, buildings, and infrastructures that have been imperfectly forgotten.

ANNOUNCEMENT

"Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences that precede and surround it"^[1].

"In fact, ghosts are characteristically attached to the events, things, and places that first produced them; by nature, they are persistent reminders of unresolved disturbances"^[2].

Argument

Architecture and infrastructure are inhabited by specters, which are traces of what has been, what could have been, or what may one day come to be. We propose to read them through the lens of these specters by paying as much attention to absences as to presences. This symptomatic^[3] approach encourages a focus on manifestations of projects, narratives, buildings, and infrastructures that have been imperfectly forgotten^[4].

Our time asks us to think about repair before construction. Our attention is directed toward what is vulnerable, to care for wounds—those of the living as well as those of buildings. Today, we accept the negativity of destruction and abandonment before envisioning the positive act of the project. The principle of obsolescence is now integrated; our sensitivity to traces is sharper than ever. The risk of this reparative gaze lies in healing wounds without questioning them, covering traces without understanding them. Beyond visible traces and wounds, there exist negative, invisible, and spectral architectures and infrastructures: a disappeared building that leaves no trace but whose ghostly image persists; a building that contains the specters of other vanished buildings and lives; architecture whose construction never took place except in the imagination of architects and their discipline.

How can we designate these negative architectures and infrastructures when they are not visible or expressed as clearly as a destroyed work? How can we heal or repair where symptoms have not been diagnosed, where they have been suppressed or forgotten? How can we act when our attention to the vulnerability of buildings and their inhabitants provides no clear signs, but manifests in ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, ways?

One can say that an architecture is spectral under certain conditions. These conditions imply different definitions of the notion of a specter in relation to architecture. We have chosen to distinguish four, which we propose as research avenues for these study days: (1) where architecture is the support of a collective imagination haunted by specters, ghosts, and other revenants, constituting an aesthetic register comparable to other arts, such as literature, cinema, or music, and serving as a spectral technical and cultural device, akin to spirit photography or liminal spaces on the internet, to reveal or record forms of revenance; (2) where, as material edifices, architecture and infrastructure contain the specters of events (often traumatic) of which they were the framework, sometimes the instrument, and thus may become the support of testimonies; (3) where inherited architecture and infrastructure are no longer solely patrimonialized but call for a process of mourning and acceptance of specters, opening the way to a new relationship to heritage understood, notably, as negative commons; (4) where, as a profession and discipline with a charged history, architecture is haunted by its own past—including the persistent history of modernity and its multiple nostalgic returns—and yet continues to seek to make projects from its specters.

1. Hauntology: the Aesthetic Register and Mediums of Haunting

The first avenue is to follow the notion of hauntology, conceived by Jacques Derrida and taken up by Mark Fisher, which designates a particular aesthetic register encompassing literature, cinema, audiovisual productions, and music.^[5] Architecture, as a cultural field, is omnipresent within these creative domains. But how should it be designated? Does it correspond to a style, like post-punk or gothic music whose architectural expressions might be traced?^[6] Does it derive from a specific atmospheric quality of places, an architectural suspense whose aesthetic rules must be revealed? Or is it akin to approaches aiming to revisit past creations to extract spectral images, similar to the musical current of hauntology?^[7]

The capacity to haunt has always depended on specific mediums and techniques. Magical rituals could serve to embody deceased ancestors or manifest supernatural forces such as demons or angels. Painting and writing were used to reveal the invisible, to make real what had disappeared or had yet to appear. Technologies such as photography and cinema, however, radicalized this capacity by making spectral effects more immediate, before radio, television, and later digital media incorporated them into everyday life^[8]. Specters thus appeared to us in family settings, without any ritual or artistic act calling them, and without anyone having the critical distance to apprehend the haunting. With the advent of the internet and the intensification of social media use, new modes of haunting arise, infiltrating daily life, both indoors and outdoors, from the intimacy of a bedroom to the city’s large infrastructures.

Here, the goal is to constitute a corpus of projects, architectures, infrastructures, or more broadly, places responding to the aesthetic dimension of hauntology, in connection with other fields of artistic production. This corpus can also be approached from the perspective of hauntological mediums and techniques, questioning how architecture or infrastructure can themselves constitute a device of haunting—whether it operates in the ghostly atmosphere of neo-Gothic architecture, in spaces favored by contemporary “goths,” in nineteenth-century “spirit” photography, or in video games and new haunted spaces such as liminal spaces and backrooms on the internet.^[9]

2. Haunted Places: Architecture and Infrastructure as Symptom

The second avenue explores places with ghostly presences that provoke unsettling experiences.^[10] These may involve individual childhood or adolescent ghosts revealed through architectural staging^[11], or exorcism processes related to collective or geopolitical traumatic events^[12]. Infrastructure and architecture, through their material objects and spaces, as well as their visual archives and theoretical narratives, contain specters whose symptoms we can seek, recognizing their haunting where it exceeds the space allocated to it.^[13]

A key lesson of spectrality is to focus on what is not fully visible, to attune to what is fleeting, nearly imperceptible, to paradoxical presences discernible in the way they evade our senses. That which haunts us does not reveal itself easily, and its meaning is never transparently or durably acquired. The specter always eludes. Methodologically, this entails reading weak symptoms rather than seeking strong symbols. The corpus here would comprise places where events have left marks on individual and collective memories—not so-called “lieux de mémoire” (memorial sites^[14]), but spaces where traces of the event are barely visible, where monuments have not intervened to identify the history to be remembered, and where troubling symptoms have not been entirely erased nor covered by reassuring symbols.

3. Mourning: Inheriting Without Heritage

The third avenue seeks approaches that deal with inherited architectures and infrastructures outside or alongside traditional heritage conservation. In nineteenth-century Europe, as the notion of heritage emerged, different ways of inheriting these remnants appeared^[15]. They shared, however, in their institutional dimension, the establishment of a valuation of objects^[16]: some were deemed worthy of attention (for historical, aesthetic, ideological reasons, etc.), others not. The expansion of the heritage field integrated everyday objects, yet the focus remained largely on castles or cathedrals, later transferred to mills or factories. Thus, heritage, as a regime of exceptionality and sacrality, limits relations to now-protected things, controls access to ensure their conservation, and drives away ghosts^[17].

Connecting with things, like with beings, means attuning to other forms of existence, including spectral ones^[18]. But how can one connect with things (or beings) that are disappearing or have already disappeared^[19]? Patrimonialization was one answer, both for species and spaces—a response we aim to surpass here by opening a path for grief^[20] that could make room for the dead, for what they have to communicate, potentially allowing care beyond heroic rescue stances toward declining buildings, infrastructures, or territories^[21]. This hypothesis involves multiple relations to ruins and remnants, which assert themselves as a project (not merely a romantic spectacle): ruination may result from our passivity or, alternatively, be actively enacted. In the latter case, renunciation^[22] is considered a form of inheritance. Since heritage selects what it wishes to preserve, we inherit everything, including negative commons, whose specters haunt our daily lives.

The corpus we wish to assemble would consist of remnants engaging narratives and relations to ordinary things (architectures, infrastructures, territories) that disappear or persist despite our refusal to inherit them. The invoked narratives will allow the sharing of practices (ritual, funerary) that accompany the becoming specter of things. Specters are of several orders: those we wish to make exist otherwise despite disappearance (ongoing or completed), and those whose presence is undesired yet persists, from which we seek release.

4. Reflexive Nostalgias: The Specter as Project

The fourth focus concerns the specters of architecture in the act of its own creation. Architecture has largely reinvented itself throughout history by invoking a hidden or buried past, presenting the possibility of being reanimated or updated. This could involve the psyche of its creators, a significant social or political event, an urban morphological condition, or a subtle material singularity. One might even argue that no invention has ever been detached from a past, present in spectralform and itself reinvented. Architecture, in this sense, has always been inhabited by specters from its own history, as well as the histories of those who desired, built, inhabited, or destroyed it. Many authors call upon forgotten projects within the discipline, striving to make them resurface. This practice entails embracing nostalgia for a fantasized past. Here, the aim is to analyze the creative mechanisms of different forms of nostalgia based on imagining missing or forgotten architecture, pursued through a simultaneously retrospective and creative quest.

We will attempt to analyze several types of nostalgia, following reflections by Svetlana Boym^[23]. First, nostalgia for modernity, the specters of an ideal where architecture paradoxically combines social progress utopias and the destruction of the material world^[24]. Second, patrimonialization as the reverse of the modern project, conserving an idealized past that may lead to reproducing a style or specific fashion updated contemporarily. For example, when the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc invokes the specter of his thirteenth-century predecessor Villard de Honnecourt^[25], it is to legitimize himself within a lineage forgotten before the nineteenth century and the Gothic architectural revival. Finally, psychological nostalgia: the melancholic reproduction of a singular language in which the author defines or creates their own lack, attempting to fill it through a particular creative quest, as exemplified in Aldo Rossi^[26]. Between historical analysis, aesthetic reading, and psychological decryption of the creative process, this section’s corpus allows questioning the possibility for the architect to make projects with their specters, whether drawn from architectural history, broader cultural history, or the biography of the authors.

Submission guidelines

Responses to the call for papers may emerge from various disciplines and should position themselves primarily in one of the four research avenues while referencing the other three. Submissions should outline potential case studies and the stakes of the proposal. Proposals may be written in French or English. Expectations are a title (100 characters max) ; a subtitle (150 characters max) ; author’s information (Name, Surname, University affiliation, email address) ; short biography (150 words max) ; an abstract of 1,000 words max ; 3 keywords and 3 bibliographic references.

Submissions should be sent to: spectres.architecture@gmail.com.

before 15 December 2025.

They will be selected by the scientific and organizing committees to be presented at two study days organized by EVCAU and LIAT, held at ENSA Paris Malaquais-PSL and ENSA Paris-Val de Seine. Presentations may be in French or English.

Schedule

• October 2025: Distribution of the call for contribution

• 15 December 2025: Deadline for submission of abstracts

• Mid-February 2026: Notification of accepted proposals

• 20–21 May 2026: Study days at ENSA Paris-Val de Seine and ENSA Paris-Malaquais

Organizing Committee

• Gilles Delalex, Professor (ENSAPM – LIAT)

• Bérénice Gaussuin, Associate Professor (ENSAPM – LIAT) Can Onaner, Professor (ENSAPVS – EVCAU)

Scientific Committee

• Marie Artuphel, Associate Professor (ENSAPM – LIAT)

• Marion Howa, Associate Professor (ENSAPVS – CRH LAVUE)

• Muriel Girard, Professor (ENSAM – INAMA)

• Fanny Lopez, Professor (ENSAPM – LIAT)

• Mathieu Mercuriali, Professor (ENSA Paris-Val de Seine, EVCAU)

• Léa Mosconi, Associate Professor (ENSAPB – IPRAUS)

• Carmen Popescu, Professor (ENSAPVS – CRH LAVUE)

• Mathilde Sari, Contract Lecturer (ENSA de Bretagne)

• David Serero, Associate Professor (ENSAPVS – EVCAU)

• Jean-Louis Tornatore, Professor Emeritus (University of Burgundy, LIR3S)

• Dimitri Toubanos, Associate Professor (ENSAPVS – EVCAU)

Notes

^[1]Mark Fisher, Spectres de ma vie, Écrits sur la dépression et les futurs perdus (2014), Paris, Genève, Entremonde, 2021, p. 31.

^[2]Avery F. Gordon, Matières spectrales. Sociologie des fantômes (1997), Montreuil, B42, 2024, p. 16.

^[3]Reference is made to the “symptomatic reading” in Louis Althusser, Pour Marx (1965), éd. La découverte, 2005 ; Écrits sur la psychanalyse, Freud et Lacan, éd. Stock, 1993.

^[4]In his book La voix des fantômes. Quand débordent les morts (Paris, Seuil, 2024), Grégory Delaplace invites a thought experiment in which funerary rites “place” the dead in the anonymity of oblivion or remembrance. Yet, the dead sometimes exceed the space allotted to them, haunting the living who must understand what has not been properly enacted to stop their ancestors from tormenting them.

^[5]Referring to Derrida, Fisher proposes two temporal readings of hauntology: “The first refers to what no longer exists (concretely), yet remains effective as virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat,’ a fatal disposition). The second meaning of hauntology pertains to what has not yet occurred (in fact), but is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation conditioning current behavior).” Mark Fisher, Spectres de ma vie, op. cit., p. 32; Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (1993), Paris, Seuil, 2024. One may also consider the film Ghost Dance by Ken MacMullen (1983), which gives voice to Jacques Derrida ten years before the publication of Spectres de Marx. The film follows two women, played by Pascale Ogier and Léonie Mellinger, in Paris and London, who become urban supports for the projection of subjective specters.

^[6]The musical movement and Gothic aesthetics—from the English neo-Gothic romanticism of the 18th century to the latest album of The Cure (Songs of a Lost World)—cultivate a close link to architecture as a symptom of world disintegration. One may also consider the experimental music of the German band Einstürzende Neubauten (“The Collapsing New Buildings”), whose early concerts sought to exorcise spaces from their traumatic contents, explicitly addressing architecture through their compilation albums titled Strategien gegen Architekturen (“Strategies Against Architecture”). See also Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin, London, Fourth Estate, 1998, exploring the “Gothic” qualification across a broad cultural spectrum.

^[7]Hauntology, a notion taken up from Derrida by critics Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher to designate a musical current, is also associated with the English label Ghost Box and musicians such as John Foxx, Philipe Jack, The Caretaker, and Burial.

^[8]Nicolas Nova, Persistance du merveilleux. Le petit peuple de nos machines, Paris, Premier Parallèle, 2024, ch. II « Rumeurs de revenants », pp. 47-69.

^[9]Valentina Tanni, Vibes Lore Core, Esthétique de l'évasion numérique, Toulouse, Audimat éditions, 2025.

^[10]In her work, Avery F. Gordon focuses in particular on the haunting of slavery in the United States through Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987). Among other ghosts she evokes are those of the dictatorship in Argentina via Luisa Valenzuela’s Como en la guerra (1977). These stories appear as “unresolved disturbances” through the haunting experience provoked by ghosts. Avery F. Gordon, Spectral Matters, op. cit.

^[11]Notably, the work of American artist Mike Kelley, initially connected to punk circles in the 1980s, later develops around popular culture and questions of spirits and ghosts, particularly those of childhood spaces staged in Education Complex.

^[12]Among other examples, Heonik Kwon’s work on ghosts of the U.S. war in Vietnam shows how the dead, lacking proper burial during the conflict, haunt the living to receive funerals. Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

^[13]Explicitly political approaches such as Forensic Architecture, and more generally spaces haunted by ongoing colonial projects or post-independence legacies, are also relevant. See notably the thematic issue « Faire avec ou défaire les espaces de l’héritage colonial ? » by Céline Barrère, Muriel Girard, and Barbara Morovich, Cahiers de la Recherche Architecturale, Urbaine et Paysagère, no. 23, 2025 ; or Zerrin Özlem Biner, States of Dispossession : Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

^[14]Referencing Pierre Nora’s work that coined the concept of “lieux de mémoire” in the 1980s: these are supports (material or immaterial) carrying and where a collective memory of the past acts to disseminate and preserve history.

^[15]A contrast can be drawn between France and the United Kingdom: on the continent, restoration (often reconstruction of ruins) prevails, while in Britain, John Ruskin envisioned a different approach to conserving remnants of the past. Buildings, akin to bodies, have the right to die and dissolve, whereas restoration, as practiced in France, constitutes a deception. Ruskin preferred to let the “fatal day” come for a building, leaving “no dishonorable or false substitute to deprive it of the funeral office of memory.” J. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), B. Coste (trans.), Paris, Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 2011, pp. 211–212.

^[16]Alois Riegl, Le culte moderne des monuments : son essence et sa genèse (1903), Daniel Wieczorek et Françoise Choay (trad.), Paris, Éd. du Seuil, 2013.

^[17]Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard (1994) noted that Parisian revenants (buildings surviving “within the grid of planners and functionalists”) “[are] exorcised under the name of ‘heritage’.” Yet, the authors argue, this exorcism fails to contain these revenants, who “overflow […]; they possess spaces even when believed confined.” Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, L’invention du quotidien II. Habiter, cuisiner, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, pp. 189-201.

^[18]Magali Molinié, “Faire les morts féconds,” Terrain, 62, 2014, pp. 70–81; Vinciane Despret, Au bonheur des morts: Récits de ceux qui restent, Paris, La Découverte, 2015; Les morts à l’œuvre, Paris, La Découverte, 2023.

^[19]In the final chapter of Staying with Trouble, Donna Haraway presents “Stories of Camille: The Children of Compost,” imagining a character, Camille, who honors disappearing (and then gone) monarch butterflies by hybridizing genetically with the species. Successive Camilles carry this DNA, transmitting the Voice of the Dead. One mission is to reproduce the monarchs’ annual migration from the U.S. to Mexico, arriving there during the Day of the Dead. The monarch is thus preserved spectrally within human DNA, whose physical appearance and behavior are consequently altered. Donna Haraway, Vivre avec le trouble (2016), Vivien García (trad.), Vaulx-en-Velin, Éditions des mondes à faire, 2020, pp. 287-246.

^[20]Jean-Louis Tornatore, Ouvrir le chemin du chagrin. Après le patrimoine, op. cit. Tornatore borrows Haraway’s expression to question extending heritage to the terrestrial world, arguing the notion cannot fully respond to “human and other-than-human forces contributing to the Earth’s devastation” (p. 12). He calls to “open” this path to “care for extinct species, make them a place, never forget them, never erect monuments that would make us forget them” (p. 51). See also Paul Landauer's recent book on this subject: Post-démolition. L’architecture face aux nouvelles ruines (Paris, Building Books, 2025), which, in its final chapters, seeks to revive various rituals of dismantling where today we have only rituals of inauguration.

^[21]Caitlin DeSilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, highlights the role of non-human living beings inhabiting ruins due to human passivity, a quality also relevant to biodiversity decline. See also Thom Van Dooren, En plein vol : vivre et mourir au seuil de l’extinction (2016), M. Schaffner (trans.), Marseille, France, Wildproject, 2021.

^[22]Emmanuel Bonnet, Diego Landivar, Alexandre Monnin, Héritage et fermeture, Paris, éditions divergences, 2021 et Alexandre Monnin, Politiser le renoncement, Paris, éditions divergences, 2023.

^[23]Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 2002, New York, Basic Books. Here, nostalgia ceases to be purely negative, allowing reflexivity to potentially renew the present. Similarly, Mark Fisher, Spectres de ma vie, op. cit., offers a more complex, less negative understanding of nostalgia.

^[24]Infrastructures, more than architectural buildings, are imbued with the specter of modernity, containing its ideals of unity and totality—the specter of a past unrealized as imagined. Criticism today often targets infrastructures precisely for embodying past ideals while suggesting the risk of their revival. Unlike infrastructure, which is unitary, architectural buildings are fragmentary; the utopia of modernity offers only a weaker breath, with specters more diffuse. Spectral reading suggests attention to partially present things, contradictory or paradoxical. Spectral reading suggests attention to partially present things, contradictory or paradoxical expressions, in order to reveal both the potentially negative or disastrous effects of architecture, as well as the latent forces of emancipation it may contain.

^[25]Eugène Viollet-le-Duc « Première apparition de Villard de Honnecourt, architecte du XIIIe siècle », Gazette des beaux-arts, vol. 1, 1859, p. 286-295 and « Deuxième apparition de Villard de Honnecourt, à propos de la renaissance des arts », Gazette des beaux-arts, vol. 5, 1860, p. 24-31. This dialogue between the two architects reinforces Viollet-le-Duc’s approach, who, while publishing his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, seeks not only to compile accumulated knowledge of medieval construction, but also to provide a method of design based on past conceptions and forms. In France, 19th-century heritage gestures were thus instrumentalized to support a historical and nationalist narrative (Gothic architecture claimed as French), from which an industrial-age architecture was expected to emerge. Bérénice Gaussuin, Recueillir les fruits du passé. Le Dictionnaire raisonné d’Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, forthcoming. It is noteworthy, however, that Viollet-le-Duc rejects the notion that the apparition was a ghost, as the being conversing with him one evening in his office spoke “with a pronounced Picard accent (whereas no ghost would ever speak with a Picard accent)” (p. 287). The account is all the more striking as Villard de Honnecourt visits Viollet-le-Duc after the death of Jean-Baptiste Lassus, his collaborator on the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris, who had been working on the publication of the architect’s drawing notebook. See also Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879, Burlington, Hashgate, 2014, pp. 344–345.

^[26]In Aldo Rossi, architecte du suspens, en quête du temps propre de l’architecture, Geneva, Métispresses, 2016, Can Onaner emphasizes the role of typology in Rossi’s work as a system of repeated forms, removed from their historical context and recomposed in new projects. Rossi’s typologies are dead forms, detached from their function, yet they “return.” They make the absent appear, revive ancient forms, and suspend the present between multiple temporal regimes. They are simultaneously dead and alive: true specters.

SUBJECTS

Representation (Main category)

Mind and language > Representation > Cultural history

Mind and language > Representation > History of art

Mind and language > Representation > Heritage

Society > History > Urban history

Society > Geography > Geography: society and territory

Mind and language > Representation > Architecture

PLACES

• Paris, France (75) 

EVENT ATTENDANCE MODALITIES

Full on-site event 

DATE(S)

• Monday, December 15, 2025

ATTACHED FILES

• Appel_Spectres_FR.pdf

• Call_Spectres_EN.pdf

KEYWORDS

• spectre, architecture, infrastructure

INFORMATION SOURCE

• Bérénice Gaussuin

  
  

  courriel : spectres [dot] architecture [at] gmail [dot] com

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