**3. Reusing the Site of St. Odulphus**

The St. Odulphus church is located in the village of Booienhoven, near the old town of Zoutleeuw (BE). It is part of an architectural ensemble surrounded by a moat, including a rectory and a guild house, built in neoclassical style in 1846 on the remains of previous settlements. The site is listed in 1994 as a historical rural landscape. Surrounded by agricultural fields with an open character, the church tower functions as a landmark in the touristic area of Hageland and Haspengouw. The history of the site goes back to the 12th century, its name derived from an ancient wellspring and a chapel nearby. It used to be part of a populated village settlement until in 1705 it was destroyed due to the siege of Zoutleeuw. Together with the relocation of the main road nearby, this explains the isolated and remote character of the site today. The combination of this condition with the increasing secularization after WWII has caused the reduced use of the church. No longer functioning for traditional Catholic services, the church is currently abandoned and under consideration for reuse.

The building has recently been part of the programme called *Projectbureau Herbestemming Kerken* (transl. Project Office for the Reuse of Churches), an organisation initiating feasibility studies for the adaptive reuse of various parish churches, under the guidance of the Flemish Government Architect. The *Projectbureau* was created in 2016 in reaction to the increasing obsolescence of parish churches in Flanders as addressed by the Flemish authorities in the 2011 concept note *Een toekomst voor de Vlaamse parochiekerk* (transl. A future for the Flemish parish church, (Bourgeois 2011)). In 2012, 8% of the Flemish parish churches were no longer in service, 60% only hosted limited services and only half of them are open during services (Aerts et al. 2014). Because of this ongoing evolution, many cities and municipalities face the question of adaptive reuse of church buildings. Currently 65 of 115 feasibility studies are finalised and the programme is foreseen to end in 2022 (Sels 2020). The aim of it is to give insight into possible future scenarios through "research by design" by different architects.<sup>8</sup> The assignment for the St. Odulphus church was to study the potential of the interior

<sup>7</sup> In the context of this article, we focus on the Flemish context and the case of the St. Odulphus site. A full and methodological comparison with German columbarium churches is not addressed here. For an in depth study of recent German columbarium churches we refer to (Leonhard and Thomas 2012) and (Fendler et al. 2014).

<sup>8</sup> The project of the St. Odulphus church is one of the churches that has been investigated in this context by team TRACE, a consortium of UR architects, Architecten Broekx-Schiepers, Architect Saidja Heynickx and the research group *Trace–Adaptive*

to be transformed in a columbarium (Figure 4), a function that seems appropriate for the remote and calm setting. Given the scenic quality of the ensemble, its "island" character and the adjacent farmland and meadows, the design team decided together with the different stakeholders, to expand the study to the surrounding landscape. The ability to provide a central urn cemetery for Zoutleeuw with a sufficient capacity and the potential for a phased and gradual implementation allows for a soft transformation of the landscape taking into account and incorporating the history and heritage value of the site. (For an approach of this project in terms of funeral architecture and landscape see (Plevoets et al. 2019, pp. 173–84).

**Figure 4.** Columbarium church of St. Odulphus: floorplan ground floor with longitudinal and transverse section.
