Catholic Territories in a Suburban Landscape
The Built Environment of Religion in Belgium, 1945-75.
Read more about our research project in this new article (in Dutch) in the online journal Contemporanea of the Belgian association for contemporary history (BVNG – ABHC).
Here is yet another post about our small exhibition on the religious architecture of René Van Steenbergen. To stay in the holiday mood, this one is about postcards! For the exhibition, we printed postcards displaying historic and contemporary photographs of all the buildings, of which you can see some examples here. This idea was inspired by the custom of making postcards of newly constructed church buildings. On the backside of the cards, we also added a short text about the background of each church to quickly inform the visitors. Best wishes from Turnhout!
Last month, we organised a small exhibition about the religious architecture of René Van Steenbergen (1911 – 1995) in Turnhout. Van Steenbergen was a very active architect in the Campine area during the post-war period. He has an oeuvre of no less than 800 buildings, covering the different programs of the Welfare state: single family houses, schools, churches, offices, industrial buildings, sport complexes and hospitals. As you can see on this map, he realized 14 new churches in the province of Antwerp, making him the most productive church-builder of the province in the post-war period.
The exhibition featured the models of most of Van Steenbergen church buildings, made by students of the KU Leuven Architecture Faculty, and research papers on the context of these buildings, made by students of the KU Leuven Arts Faculty (under supervision of Sven Sterken and Eva Weyns). This exhibition was the start of a three-year research project on Van Steenbergen by KU Leuven in collaboration with AR-TUR and Architectuur Archief van de Provincie Antwerpen (APA). To be continued!
During the Open Church Days, this exhibition about the religious architecture of René Van Steenbergen will take place in the Church of the Blijde Boodschap in the Parkwijk in Turnhout. This exhibition is realized as part of a research seminar in architectural history at the Architecture Faculty of KU Leuven (under supervision of Sven Sterken and Eva Weyns) and a seminar about recent history at the Arts Faculty of KU Leuven (under supervision of Eva Weyns) .
Here are some of the interiors that we visited during the the DOCOMOMO Belgium excursion on April 22 on the topic of liturgical renewal and modern architecture after Vatican II. The churches included in this tour reflect each in their own way, a double paradigm shift: on the one hand the acceptance of architectural modernism as a fashionable means of expression in religious circles; on the other hand, an increasingly radical departure from traditional church typologies in response to society’s cry for renewal . Thus, these churches openly question the received image of the church as a sacred monument, proposing a more functional notion of the place for worshiping as a carefully designed piece of religious infrastructure instead.
