In the last alcove of the white gallery at arc en rêve in Bordeaux, 30 red plaster models depict hollowed-out circulation spaces as 30 relational situations that condition users' ability to appropriate architecture.

In the exhibition Class Struggle, Architectures and Learning Situations, RAUM's productions question the arrangement of matter as a way of interrogating architecture itself. Through the experience of what it produces, it questions the discipline's capacity for interaction with the world, refocusing it on what it can do. Although architecture does not teach, resolve conflicts or cure, viewing it for what it is as a constructed device is not a defeatist position. On the contrary, it is a concrete opportunity to develop a critical eye by analysing the structural conditions and spatial situations that architecture offers.

Therefore, the first question we ask here is “what can architecture do?” at a time when, on the one hand, construction remains a tool for capitalisation¹ and, on the other hand, the architectural community itself looks elsewhere, seeking reasons for its existence outside its own discipline. When it comes to what architecture can do, we can undoubtedly say that it cannot do much. And yet, at the same time, it can do a great deal: what interests us, within the architectural field of teaching and learning, is a way of thinking about architecture not as an isolated educational tool but as the material foundation that makes a set of relational systems possible. In other words, thinking objectively about architecture does not lead us to seek out its effects, but rather interests us in its causes: the development of all the conditions for its integration into the environment, as well as the possibilities it offers in terms of physical relationships and uses.

Beyond its capacity to connect people to places, the hypothesis of a hodological space put forward by philosopher and historian Jean Marc Besse in 2004² questions the body in motion as it encounters the landscape, offering an opportunity for a complex and, above all, objective definition of “living spaces” and their relationship to movement.“Hodology” comes from the Greek word Hodos, meaning path or way.

When questioning what architecture can do, creating spatial conditions conducive to appropriation is a very concrete answer, rooted both in the material way of creating these connections and in the analysis of the interstitial status between them.

How can corridors, staircases and entrance halls be transformed into spaces in their own right that offer the qualities of their flaws? Essentially undefined and functional, circulation spaces offer the opportunity to become something else. Working with them as they are, rather than simply as the result of the necessary distribution between the various programme entities, makes it possible to lay the foundations for an “efficient” approach, where compactness appears to be both an economic and an energy-related requirement that limits heat loss and reduces the amount of material needed to operate a building.

Following the example of Claude Parent's work and superimposed on the horizontality of circulation, the slope and vertical movement offer a second hypothesis, that of the multiplication of uses made possible by these “extra” spaces, which offer a fertile spatial richness for free appropriation. This hypothesis reveals two challenges: that of uses enhanced by slopes, stairs or steps, and that of working with the topography of the site. More generally, this testing of architecture by topography takes us beyond usage to open up possible connections to the ground. This almost “primitive” way of thinking about vertical connections in architecture was used in particular by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre³, and later by Kenneth Frampton⁴, in their researches on the conditions for ”reterritorialising” modern architecture in their environments.

Consider the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, which draws on the topography of the site, where the natural slope allows it to adapt to the location and makes the project unique. It is indeed nature that allows the generic character of an exogenous project to be transformed into a suitable structure, a layout that takes the shape of the ground as its primary topic. Furthermore, and to remain within the Greek landscape described by Henry Miller in 1939⁵, whose unique hillside constructions made a profound impression on the modernists of CIAM⁶ III in 1933⁷, we can observe how, faced with the highly distinctive Hellenic topography, the modern “situated” hypothesis became distorted by gradually denying this issue. Since the 1950s, alongside the industrialisation of agriculture (and for the same reasons), there has been a gradual shift from architecture that adapts to slopes and soil composition towards a more generic architecture based on major earthworks, made possible by the mechanization of construction. Here we can see how the idea of the “reterritorialisation” of universal modernity has reached its limits and how economic and technical flows inherently standardise, smoothing out unique possibilities and minority desires. 

Returning to the subject of paths, Jean Marc Besse's hypothesis of a hodological space is probably of greater interest to us in his last two notes (of the four that make up his introduction to hodology in contemporary thought), which offer a more objective interpretation of the role of paths and the movement of bodies in architecture.

In response to our initial question—what architecture can do—we formulate two distinct hypotheses: the first is based on the work of accompanying pathways through which hodological architecture can provide the conditions for unplanned spatial situations, and the second on the physical capacity of the ground and topography to subvert and render desirable a generic programme.

In other words, and more generally, what are the means of distinguishing architecture on the one hand and connecting it to its territory on the other?

This results in a critical stance towards standardisation of all kinds, whether modern or local-vernacular (in both cases, generic), paving the way for uniqueness and difference. Hodological architecture would then become liberating, and we could transpose it into a metaphorical image, that of Werner Herzog's boat, which in the film Fitzcarraldo connects man, opera and the Amazon rainforest, and which Gilles Deleuze interprets as perhaps one of the most beautiful relationships between man and the world: “In Fitzcarraldo, it is even more direct that the heroic (the crossing of the mountain by the heavy boat) is the means to the sublime: that the entire virgin forest becomes the temple of Verdi's opera and Caruso's voice.⁸”

1. Read Jean-Louis Violeau, De quoi l’architecte est-il l’auteur, éditions du Moniteur, 2025, in French. ↗
2. Jean Marc Besse « Quatre notes sur l’introduction de l’hodologie dans la pensée contemporaine » publié dans Les carnets du paysage n°11, 2004, in French. ↗
3. Alexandre Tzonis et Liane Lefaivre, « The Grid and the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris and Suzana Antonakakis, with Prolegomena to a History of the Culture of Modern Greek Architecture », in Architecture in Greece, 15, 1981. ↗
4. Kenneth Frampton, « Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance », in Hal Foster (sous la direction de) The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture, Bay Press, 1983. ↗
5. Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, Colt Press, 1941. ↗
6. International Congresses of Modern Architecture, editor’s note. ↗
7. Architectures of the slope filmed (and staged) in the Cyclades by László Moholy-Nagy, and described in Moholy’s edit. The Avant-Garde at Sea, August 1933 by Chris Blencowe and Judith Levine, Lars Müller Publishers, 2018. ↗
8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, The Athlone Press, 1986 (English edition). ↗