Landscape for Mourning – Adaptive Reuse of a Rural Church and its Surroundings as an urn Cemetery

This paper elaborates on the design of a place for mourning as a new use for an abandoned church building and its surroundings. Rather than replacing Christian worship with a secular program, the project aims to reactivate and strengthen the historical presence of spirituality by adding new layers to the design of this historic church. Using the singularity of the place and the quality of its rural landscape as catalysts, the proposed design seeks to place death and the act of mourning within a broader and renewed spiritual experience by borrowing and associating concepts related to rituals from different cultures and times. Besides a columbarium and a funeral space, the site may be used as a place for the celebration of life and its memory or simply as a meaningful place to meet with family or friends. The church, for which an adaptive reuse proposal is discussed in this paper, is one of many in Flanders that, in recent years, has lost its religious function as the result of the secularization of society. The presented project is part of a research program initiated by the Flemish Government that aims to conduct feasibility studies for the transformation of parish churches using research-by-design as a methodology.