I. DISCOVER
My developing research publication, Mass Extinction, discusses the decline of liturgical practice in Glasgow within the spatial context of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia's post-war ecclesiastic inventory. Driven by the reinvention of the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Modernist-influenced structures were generated as tangible examples of the reinvented liturgical dynamic. Their current status, however, is mostly as poorly maintained and somewhat dilapidated structures with a severe lack of public appreciation. A rejection of both religious activity and modernist technique has left nearly a quarter abandoned or destroyed with many more facing socio-economic difficulty.
II. DEVELOP
The [ongoing] design response is via adaptation of one such site, St. Charles Borromeo Church, into a learning centre for the circular economy. Structurally, adaptive reuse as itself a form of circularity; questioning every element of materiality through both reuse of the waste stream generated and any new, introduced material sourced from within the peri-urban region. Discussing circular principles applied to the existing material, concrete is the most challenging; hence, concrete becomes, in effect, 'consecrated' in situ, a defined rule that it must remain entirely without alteration. The infill brick masonry has been removed and regurgitated into a new internal structure - the threshold of interiority is redefined whilst creating spectacular visual permeability into an environment previously fraught with conformity and privacy. Yet, the form of the original construction is maintained. The new insertion is monolithic yet intimate - it distills a learning process for circularity into principles of education, application and fabrication allegorising with the tripartite existence of spirit, soul and body. To receive, to animate, to incarnate. Thus, the building becomes an incubation of it’s theory: a catalyst to promote, define and direct sustainable intervention. A project that decrees that liturgical intervention can be more unique, more aggressive. In fact, with the present situation, it has to be.
