Jean-Christophe Bailly is an essayist, philosopher, poet, playwright and inhabitant of frontiers between genres — a literary and essay-writing nomad. Painting, photography, literature, poetry and architecture — no art form is missing from his work. Having written much about cities and the French landscape (in a book entitled Le Dépaysement, which he defined as being ‘about France’) in this text he writes about very obscure relationships between literature and architecture, between one art on the side of fluidity and impermanence and the other that is all about solidity and tends towards a kind of eternity.