What runs under your skin – the monastic link to co-housing.

Abstract

Individual housing is no longer the only ideal contemporary way of living because of cost, loneliness and environmental footprint in Western Europe. As a consequence, cohabitation projects become popular tools to the adaptive reuse of underused heritage sites. However, besides creating the best material context, different intangible factors are decisive in their fragile development process. Another hopeful insight is that collective housing is part of our WesternEuropean DNA (De Bruyn, J. & Malliet, A., 2015). At the same time, a traditional cohabitation typology struggles to get by. Despite their survival of many past storms, monastic communities face one of their greatest challenges in present Western Europe: disinterest. They are enclosed islands of peace and quiet, but they also demonstrated flexibility and resilience during their 1.700 years of existence. A historical and spatial study, on both local and international level, indicates a hybrid living concept, which is the subject of continues monastic experiments with 6 intangible characteristics in a identifiable frame: spirituality, hospitality, servitude, logistic assistance, cultivation of the open space and above all, permanent residence of a community (Lens, K. 2014). Our almost finished dissertation about adaptive reuse of monasteries identifies the wide variety of monastic cohabitation examples as vital instruments to revalue both the intangible heritage of cohousing and the monastic heritage sites. We are consulted to implement these statements in the real-life complex contexts of actual cases in Belgium and the Netherlands, which are integrated in our (interior) architecture studios1 . We want to stimulate our students in the adaptive reuse studio during the 3th bachelor and master (interior) architecture to develop complex sustainable heritage concepts in discussion with concerned (potential) inhabitants with a focus on contemporary needs of society in general in order to propose a personal and customized design answer.