The Long Goodbye: The Lived Experience of Sacred Architecture Loss in Deindustrialised Communities PhD

Greg Shepherd [PhD year 1]

Supervisors: Kate Jordan & Krystallia Kamvasinou

This research explores how the decline, closure and loss of sacred architecture is experienced in deindustrialised communities. Rather than treating churches as obsolete buildings or redevelopment problems, my project examines how their disappearance affects the people who worshipped in them and lived near them. Drawing on concepts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sara Ahmed and others, the research is focused on questions of habit, embodied memory and the ways in which individuals become disoriented when familiar sacred spaces are demolished. 

It argues that sacred architectural loss can extend our understanding of disorientation and reorientation by exploring the temporality and unevenness of these processes. In Merleau-Ponty’s famous mirrored-room experiment, for example, the transition from disorientation to reorientation occurs seamlessly and almost instantaneously. The ‘long goodbye’ of sacred architecture, however, is neither immediate nor smooth. Disorientation may develop over years or decades as a building closes, declines and is finally demolished. Likewise, reorientation can take years as individuals and communities develop new memories and habits that allow them to make the altered world inhabitable.

KEY WORDS: sacred architecture; phenomenology; deindustrialisation; disorientation