Lecture: Architectural quality in repurposing Flemish churches

Looking ahead to the year 2025, when religious heritage will take center stage, we set out on the path to a number of repurposed churches on Architecture Day. Every village, town and city district in the region featured a mostly iconic church building. Many of these churches are now vacant, have been repurposed or are threatened with demolition.

On June 14, on the eve of Architecture Day, Roel De Ridder will give a lecture on the situation in Belgium. In his lecture, Roel will explain why the reuse and repurposing of parish churches in Flanders has been slow to take off. He traces the emphasis on quality architecture in contemporary Flemish examples and explains the pronounced public focus of those examples. Throughout the lecture, Roel exposes the many concerns and sensitivities of the discourse in Flanders. The lecture will take place in the Auditorium of SCHUNCK.

About Roel de Ridder

Roel De Ridder (b. 1982) received a doctorate in architecture from UHasselt in 2013. Since graduating as an architect in 2007, he has been studying the future of Flemish Parish Churches. For more than ten years he has been teaching at the Faculty of Architecture at KU Leuven (Sint-Lucas Brussels and Sint-Lucas Ghent). In October 2022, Roel started as coordinator of the Platform for the Future of Parish Churches, a collaboration between the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities (VVSG) and the expertise center for religious heritage PARCUM, commissioned by the Flemish government. The Platform works as a counter for local administrations and church boards, provides communication on the theme, maintains dialogue with policy actors, engages in formation and monitoring of the field and supports local partners with church policy plans and concrete trajectories of secondary and reallocation of parish churches, in very different areas.

ELEMENTS

This activity is part of ELEMENTS. Read more about this collaboration and the program here.