Resurrecting Håby church: Communicating a millennium of alteration and rehabilitation through conservation and adaptive reuse

Abstract

As winds shift and populations change, churches in Sweden have gone in and out of religious use during a millennium of history. Currently, the Church of Sweden is entering a period where numerous churches in rural areas will be deemed redundant due to increasing urbanization and declining membership numbers. Being an early example, Håby church outside of Munkedal in Swedish Bohuslän was closed indefinitely in 2023. Its history traces back to the 1100s and it has been subject to several alterations, rehabilitations and conservational approaches throughout its lifetime. Since 1988, legislation protects churches built before 1940 through preservation. The thesis proposes a speculative future scenario of adaptive reuse outside of these legal restrictions. Working with both living and lost memory, the thesis grapples with the pedagogical value of heritage and explores if selected historical traces need to be removed to increase the communicative values of others when applying conservational approaches, as exemplified by Erik Lundberg’s conservation of Götene church (1964). A deep understanding of the church is sought by carefully mapping out, reconstructing and visualising its different historical manifestations and inventories, inspired by but expanding on Flores & Prats’ process on “Sala Beckett” (2016). Thereafter, a design strategy is formulated, where restoration, preservation and adaptive reuse strategies are selectively applied in different parts of the church to strengthen their existing cultural-historical heritage values through a communicative approach. Thus providing added pedagogical value. The church is then redesigned into a combined road church and restaurant, where an addition is built and the nave is divided into a chapel and dining hall. Letting the history of the church inform the design, historical traces are reintroduced and assets are relocated, disassembled and reassembled into new configurations. This opens the church to the public once again, while retaining the religious inventories both with their original purposes and as bearers of cultural heritage. As this is but one of many redundant churches to come and churches being just one category of heritage buildings in general, the thesis emphasizes the importance of thorough investigations and evaluations to see adaptive reuse opportunities and communicate our cultural-historical heritage.