Belgium remains a landscape of churches, but many of those churches have stood empty since the turn of the century. De Smet Vermeulen architects transformed one of those buildings in Ghent into a new community centre.

Creating symbolic spaces for the desire for collectivity: if it is not a timeless definition of architecture, churches are certainly a good example of it. The question is whether it matters why people gather in a place, and how definitive the influence is on a building. Can anything else take place in architecture designed for liturgical rituals? Or is a church the most functionalist building imaginable, because everything is dedicated to the higher purpose?