The Monastic Landscape – Carrier of memory and potential catalyst in conservation and adaptive reuse processes of material and immaterial heritage

Abstract

Monasteries are a challenging architectural typology to study conservation because of their indissoluble connection to their environment. Different monastic rules define their spiritual and daily life, visualised in rituals during a permanent and repeated quest for spiritual and spatial perfection. Despite their seemingly secluded life of contemplation, the inhabitants of monasteries not only care for their own welfare. They spatially and socially shape the surrounding landscape and vice versa. This complex interdependence results in a hybrid and progressive balance, which evolved to their current state with trial and error through time. Currently in Western Europe, monasteries are going through a process of secularisation and ageing. To conserve our monastic heritage today, we also have to deal with the resulting fragile equilibrium. Therefore, every spatial intervention is catalogued as an adaptation. Experiencing their shrinking population as a threat, the religious communities turn to different stakeholders, including (interior and landscape) architects and designers, to develop a process and methodology of adaptive reuse.1 The research group TRACE of the Faculty of Architecture and Arts at the University of Hasselt, studies several cases of religious heritage in a PhD thesis and projects funded by the Flanders Heritage Agency to reflect on the matter. The faculty also involves the various design studios of interior architecture (including the recently created International Master Adaptive Reuse2) as “laboratories” for research by design.