Can ‘house churches’ be seen as ‘authentic monuments’? The heritage problem of post-WWII Modern Roman-Catholic church architecture in Belgium

Within Belgian Roman-Catholic church architecture the ‘house church’ [huiskerk] constitutes an as yet unanswered problem of heritage conservation. First developed in the 1950’ies, the ‘house church’ became the favoured model after the Second Vatican Council, interpreting the place of worship as a domestic space. This case of modern architectural heritage is under threat without having been inscribed in the collective memory or subjected to scientific research. Its very lack of ‘monumentality’ seems to be a weakness. How can criteria be devised for monuments without monumentality? The answer may be found in the authenticity of these churches, which lies in the conscious representation of the Belgian Roman-Catholic climate of the fifties, a representation which implied breaking away from ‘monumentality’. The authenticity assessment of the ‘house churches’ needs therefore to be closely tied with the investigation of the nature of monumentality.status: publishe