Cultural Dossier Title

From Latent Place to Relational Organism: Regenerating a Building in Angoulême through an Architecture of the Living

Table of Contents

Introduction
Presentation of the abandoned building in Angoulême and the challenges of the project.

I. The Latent Place
I.1. A Central Building without Uses
I.2. Latency as Spatial and Social Rupture

II. Regenerating through the Living
II.1. The Building as a Relational Organism
II.2. Regenerating without Erasing or Romanticizing

Conclusion
Synthesis and opening toward the project The Hotel of the Living.

Introduction

In the center of Angoulême, an abandoned building remains fully present in the urban landscape. Its structure and façades are intact, yet its functions have vanished. It is neither ruin nor preserved heritage, but an intermediate state where the place exists materially without being inhabited. This condition reflects latency: a suspended time in which architecture no longer serves its social role while still carrying traces and memory.

Such buildings reveal broader transformations affecting medium-sized cities. In Angoulême, economic and urban shifts have produced vacant central spaces that disrupt flows, weaken everyday uses, and challenge the city’s capacity to sustain social connections. The studied building embodies these tensions: marked by a productive past yet excluded from current life. Its latency is therefore charged with both absence and potential.

Regenerating this type of place cannot rely solely on restoration or regulatory logic. It requires viewing the building as a milieu to reactivate rather than an object to correct. Existing materials, spatial traces, rhythms, and light become project resources, encouraging continuity instead of erasure.

An architecture of the living here refers not to decorative nature but to cycles and relationships linking humans, materials, climates, and uses. The building becomes a relational organism capable of generating new interactions while preserving its past through a posture of care.

This raises key questions: how to integrate ecology without romanticism or greenwashing, and how to regenerate without denying history or excluding users?

The dossier therefore asks how an architecture of the living can transform a latent place into a relational organism. It is structured in two parts: contextual analysis of the Angoulême building and a conceptual framework supporting the Bachelor project, The Hotel of the Living.

Outline (to become the development)

I. The Latent Place: Memory, Traces, and Challenges of an Abandoned Building in Angoulême
I.1. Angoulême and Its Buildings in Waiting: Urban, Social, and Symbolic Context
– Transformation of the city center and the emergence of vacant spaces
– The studied building: location, past uses, inherited materiality
– Contemporary issues: loss of uses and disruption of urban continuity

I.2. Latency as a Spatial and Cultural Condition
– A place neither ruined nor inhabited: suspended uses
– Anthropological and semiological reading of a space in waiting
– Active memory, tensions, and potentials of the existing built fabric

II. Toward an Architecture of the Living: Regeneration, Relationships, and Ecological Responsibility
II.1. Thinking the Living as Relation: Theoretical Frameworks and Conceptual Shifts
– The living as a system of cycles and interdependencies
– The building as a relational organism
– Transforming through care rather than erasure

II.2. Regenerating without Romanticizing: Memory, Critical Ecology, and Inclusive Uses
– Activating existing materials, traces, and rhythms
– Avoiding greenwashing and superficial ecology
– The Hotel of the Living as a relational and inclusive device

Conclusion

Bibliography

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