| Project Id |
4007 |
| Project Name |
Jacobuskerk Utrecht, Netherlands |
| Description |
The Old Catholic St. Jakobus Church has been transformed into a spacious home. There have been no services in the church since 1991, and in the period up to 2007 the church was used as a showroom for antique furniture, a meeting room and small concerts. In the long term it is conceivable that the church can be converted for public purposes such as a library, bookstore, museum or even another church. As little as possible of the existing church has been "touched" or adjusted. The existing wooden floor, the stained glass windows and old doors have been preserved and restored locally. For these functions, a large mezzanine floor was made in the 90s, which broke the spatiality of the church. The intermediate floor from the 90s has been transformed in the design into a functional and spatial sculpture in the monument. The modern living volume has been 'kept separate' from the old building in detail and can be considered as a temporary 'resident' of the historic church. |
| Description of the economic, social and environmental impacts of the project |
The Netherlands has hundreds of vacant churches. Since the 1970s, more than 1,000 churches have been divested by church communities. More than a third of them were demolished and of the Catholic churches even half. In the coming years, another 1000 churches will lose their original function. Fortunately demolition is becoming less common, partly because the churches are often on the list of monuments. Re-use is often the only way to prevent long-term vacancy or demolition. With the redevelopment of the St. Jakobus church the starting point was to revive a worthy monument with minimal intervention. The special quality of this project is that the church has been transformed into one home. The church is not divided into small residential units, so the spatiality of the church would have been lost. In addition, small residential units or split ownership situations make new re-use impossible in the future. |
| Web links |
https://www.zecc.nl/nl/Projecten/project/23/Woonkerk-XL-Utrecht |
| Country |
Netherlands |
| City size |
Intermediate cities (between 50.000-1 million people) |
