The preservation and reuse of urban churches as a contribution to the urban landscape

Abstract

Through massing , scale, craftsmanship, and their traditional role, church buildings are valuable to the city. They play an important role in the cognitive and formal ordering of the city. They are important to the temporal contect of the city. As the site of milestone events in many people's lives, or as symbols of these events in others' lives, church buildings are important for the collective memory. The grand scale of the church space combined with careful small scale detailing, make it a place with qualities that are rare in the daily life of most people. Because of their importance to the city opportunities and methods to reuse church buildings should be found if the buildings are abandoned by their congregations. Uses should be found that are sympathetic to the spirit and the form of the building. The forms in church architecture are powerful enough that they can survive extensive, yet sensitive, new construction to accommodate a new use and allow the place to read as a new building that was once a church. In order to allow the building to provide a temporal context to the present, when the building is given a new use it must also be given a new image. The elements of the image of a church must be analyzed to discover those which are the most powerful and how they may be changed to allow revealing juxtapositions that say, "this building was a church but is one no longer." In changing the image of the church building, care must be taken not to destroy those qualities which made attempting its reuse worthwhile. These issues are investigated in a series of case studies of reused churches. Several new issues in the redesign of church buildings were discovered through the case studies. The result is a set of observations and conclusions that are a synthesis of the real and the ideal.