Mediating Religious Elements

Abstract

This project explores the utilisation of the collective memory of vacant churches and the architectural elements within them as incentives for their transformation and reuse. The number of decommissioned churches in the Netherlands is increasing with rapid secularisation, and many churches remain empty. The purpose of this paper is to find a method to connect the collective memory within elements in a church and utilise them for the church’s redesign. This study will focus on one such church for theoretical application of the methodology, the Saint Augustinus church in Amsterdam Noord, which has been empty since 2014. Finding a way to reconnect the church to its neighbourhood using the collective memory of the neighbourhood around this church, could be a way to socially sustain the church and prevent it from going into disuse. The individual memory of the churchgoers is rather subjective, but as churches have been a part of the landscape of the cities of the Netherlands for long periods, they also have shared memories. The way to investigate the collective memory of the church is to collect individual stories and find common strings among them. A phenomenological study of these architectural elements provides the way they are experienced and how this can be enhanced for the community to feel connected to them again. This paper thus answers the question of how the collective memory of the church can set in motion the transformation and conservation of vacant churches.