Young Churches in Flanders. A Framework for Critical Assessment

Lately, the future use of parish churches has become a prominent discussion topic in Flanders, Belgium, the urgency of which contrasts with the general lack of knowledge on the subject. The Flemish dioceses have started only in 2012 to inventory their parish churches, while scholarly research on religious heritage is still in its early stages and examples of successful conversions are few. To improve policy-making, in 2008, the Flemish Heritage Institute (VIOE) launched a “Thematic Inventory of Twentieth-Century Churches in Flanders (1914-2000),” which was carried out by the KADOC (Documentation and Research Centre for Religion, Culture and Society), the Sint-Lucas architecture institute (now KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture), and the University of Leuven’s Faculty of Engineering, Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning. Both authors of this paper participated in this project, which comprised two parts: an inventory and a framework for value assessment. From the inventory, it could be derived that the assumed predominance of neo-Gothic churches in Flanders must be nuanced as they are outnumbered by 20th-century constructions that are less homogeneously distributed, chronologically as well as geographically. The central hypothesis in assessing this young patrimony was the unsuitability of traditional criteria such as rarity, age, and monumentality. Moreover, during the research, it was found that still today many such churches are considered “modern” (meaning “ugly”), while their liturgical concept is often not understood. Not as much present in the urban environment as their ancestors, these buildings are also poorly embedded in the collective memory. It follows that the heritage value of young parish churches has to be explicitly demonstrated. To that end, we designed a specific framework for value assessment. To test its validity, the model was applied to a selection of ten thoroughly researched cases. Now that the Flemish government has finally acknowledged the urgency of the problem, this conference provides an excellent opportunity for developing further this model into a truly operational tool. We thus propose to briefly discuss its rationale and trigger the discussion by applying it to two case studies.status: publishe