New lives for deconsecrated churches. Symbolic values and the identity of places

There are many reasons why a religious building loses its sacred character. New political and social developments, abandonment of previous religious practices in favour of others, economic necessity, a reduction in the number of people in the local communities: these are just some of the possible reasons why it is decided to deconsecrate a church and turn it into a secular building. The means by which new life can be injected into buildings conceived and built to be sacred places is simple. In the case of Catholic churches, there are several reasons why a church may be deconsecrated, such as changes in parish structures or the population in the area, damage to the structure rendering impossible to use or simply that it is no longer practical to use it (Montini 2000) and they are ruled by Canon law, in particular Can 1211, Can 1212, Can 1222 (§ 1 e § 2). The key question is whether this gesture is enough to efface the complexity of the meanings embodied in a church at different scales and levels, transforming it into a simple container in which a new use can be installed. Very often the way these places are in fact reused does not have a close relationship with the ‘container’ – that is, with the material nature of the building – but is the result of other kinds of logic (commercial, economic, occasional, spatial and architectural) which partially interpret the tangible and intangible components of the built heritage. The cases are many and varied. The solutions that can be observed range from unplanned interventions to highly sophisticated operations. One of many possible examples of this process is the Dominican church in Maastricht in the Netherlands (Hovens et al. 2006) which since 1796, the year when it was reassigned to military use, has served widely varied functions, alternating with periods of abandonment: storage room for Maastricht town council, headquarters of the Municipal Orchestra, art gallery, flower display (Fig. 1), parties (Fig. 2), boxing arena, car shows, storage facility for bicycles and finally a bookstore1 (Figs. 3-4). The current solution is the result of a complex design process whose outcome focuses on a specific item – a multi-level, steel, black, walk-in bookcase situated asymmetrically in the church – to which is entrusted the value of the solution found (Weelen 2014: 25–27). The basic idea is that the customers of the bookshop, while browsing the books on sale, can ‘experience the colossal dimensions of the church and view the historical murals from close-by’2. The question that underlies the operation, which needs to be argued in depth, is whether the refined design of the furnishings and the use of the space, avowedly designed to be reversible, are sufficient to preserve the spirit of the place and safeguard the tangible and intangible heritag