**5. Genius Loci or the Spirit of Place—Conclusions**

Rather than considering the reuse of the St. Odulphus church a spiritual loss, we believe that it can offer the opportunity to reinforce and open up the traditional symbolic and ritual meaning of the Christian liturgy to the larger community. The inherent flexibility of the Christian funeral rite did not only inspire the reuse design, but the rituals performed here will be reinforced and become inspired themselves by the space. As such, this case fits very well within the contemporary pluriform Flemish religious context. Connecting ritual and space in this way, the symbolism of the Christian funeral ritual can at the same time be strengthened and experienced by all users on different levels and without imposing it. By organically adding rather than reducing layers of meaning, the design tries to adhere to the memory of the site and remain faithful to its religious origins.

In this paper, we presented a re-localization of the religious experience of this place, from the church towards an involvement of the wider environment of the landscape. In times of declining and disappearing institutional religion, abandoned churches like the St. Odulphus can gain a renewed religious meaning to the community today, through the repeated and double perspective of space and ritual. Re-activating the spiritual character of the place recalls the notion of *genius loci* or spirit of place. Known in Roman antiquity and introduced in architecture and landscape design since the 18th century, it has been defined in broad phenomenological terms by architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz in 1979 as a "meaningful place for man to dwell".11 As such, it is the true calling of architecture to express this spiritual identity of a certain *locus* in ever new and changing cultures. The Belgian Monk Frédéric Debuyst refers to "interiority" as an essential property for a Christian *genius loci* (Debuyst 1997), more recently followed by Bert Daelemans S.J. using the neologism "theotopy" in an attempt to translate theology into architecture (Daelemans 2015). Both apply the concept to church buildings as sacred places that resonate with the intimate connection between man and space. With this proposal of adaptive reuse for the St. Odulphus church and site as a columbarium and urn cemetery, we hope to express the *genius loci* of this particular place, to preserve and even reinforce its particular identity in a time where too many of them are abandoned and no longer used.

"Although what I call Genius Loci can never be personified, we may yet feel him nearer and more potent, in some individual monument or feature of the landscape. He is immanent very often, and subduing our hearts most deeply, at a given turn of a road; or a path cut in terraces in a hillside, with view of great distant mountains; or, again, in a church like Classe, near Ravenna; most of all, perhaps, in the meeting-place of streams, or the mouth of a river, both of which draw our feet and thoughts time after time, we know not why or wherefore. The genius of places lurks there; or, more strictly, *he is it.*" (Lee 1907, p. 6)

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, S.G. and N.V.K.; writing—original draft preparation, S.G. and N.V.K.; writing—review and editing, S.G. and N.V.K.; visualization, N.V.K.; all figures by N.V.K. except when mentioned. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
