Explorations on terrains vagues

Communication donnée dans le cadre du colloque Undwelling: A Glossary for the New World, Facultà di Architettura, La Sapienza, Rome, 19 février 2026.

Carole Lévesque holds a PhD in the history and theory of architecture from the University of Montreal and a professional Master of Architecture from the University of British-Columbia. She taught at the schools of architecture of the University of Montreal and of the American University of Beirut before joining the School of design at the University of Quebec in Montreal in 2012. She is a research fellow at the Centre Cultures-Arts-Sociétés, an interdisciplinary research center focused on exploring and understanding togetherness. She is also co-founder of the Bureau d’étude de pratiques indisciplinées (BéPI), a research bureau centered around practices of inventory and representation. Members of the bureau investigate research-by-design practices, collaborating with other disciplinary fields on questions pertaining to design, architecture, and urban and territorial design.

More specifically, her work centers around forms of representation of the urban territory, its temporalities and uses, particularly of abandoned areas. As such, she has developed an expertise on the study of terrain vague, representing them into oversized hand and ink drawings. Her interest lies in how, while being both the memory and the future of the city, these areas are excluded from our present daily experience.

Through the study of abandonment, she seeks to give terrains vagues a representation worthy of their value, to give them a presence that could allow them to be looked at differently, with curiosity instead of disdain or fear, and for what they offer now, as something worthy in of itself, instead of lingering in a nostalgic past or projecting what their future state should become.

She is the author of À propos de l’inutile en architecture (L’Harmattan, 2011) and Finding Room in Beirut: Places of the Everyday (Punctum Books, 2019), has codirected Urban Inventory: Documentation as Design Project (BéPI, 2021) and -in Drawing: Inquiry, Time, Dialogue and Materiality (BéPI, 2024), and is co-author of Drawing and the Imaginary of Place, to be published by Bloomsbury Publishings later this year (2026).