Landscape for mourning - adaptive reuse of a rural church and its surroundings as an urn cemetery

Abstract

This paper elaborates on the design of a place for mourning as a new use for an abandonedchurch building and its surroundings. Rather than replacing Christian worship with a secular pro-gram, the project aims to reactivate and strengthen the historical presence of spirituality by add-ing new layers to the design of this historic church. Using the singularity of the place and thequality of its rural landscape as catalysts, the proposed design seeks to place death and the actof mourning within a broader and renewed spiritual experience by borrowing and associatingconcepts related to rituals from different cultures and times. Besides a columbarium and afuneral space, the site may be used as a place for the celebration of life and its memory or sim-ply as a meaningful place to meet with family or friends. The church, for which an adaptivereuse proposal is discussed in this paper, is one of many in Flanders that, in recent years, haslost its religious function as the result of the secularization of society. The presented project ispart of a research program initiated by the Flemish Government that aims to conduct feasibilitystudies for the transformation of parish churches using research-by-design as a methodology