Background

Increasingly across the Western world, traditional religious buildings are being converted for secular use, like housing, restaurants, or performance halls. At the same time, congregations are appearing in formerly secular spaces, adapting old shopping malls, storefronts, and movie theaters for their spaces of worship.

Purpose

This study employs a novel methodology to identify where these hybrid buildings are located and to explore what these buildings might mean in the context of the American religious landscape.

Methods

Using a database of addresses identified as potential converted structure candidates, I conduct one of the first known attempts to systematically identify these building conversions. I employed the Google Street View tool to locate these buildings in six mid-sized cities in the United States. Once these buildings had been located, I collected visual data of the exteriors using Google Street View and identified the presence of sacred and secular formal and functional elements present in the buildings.

Results

Based on the formal and functional elements identified in each conversion, I expanded Hackworth and Gullikson’s (2013) typology for converted structures to include eight potential categories of conversion, five of which are represented by cases from my sample. I located 175 secular-to-sacred building conversions and 12 sacred-to-secular building conversions. Of the 175 secular-to-sacred building conversions, 89 buildings fell into the “secular form, mixed function” category, while 86 fell into the “secular form, sacred function” category. Of the 12 sacred-to-secular building conversions, 10 fell into the “sacred form, secular function” category, while 2 fell into the “mixed form, secular function” category. Additionally, while not an initial focus of this study, my sample included 2 building conversions that fell into the “sacred form, sacred function” category, revealing the third direction of building conversion: sacred-to-sacred.

Conclusions and Implications

While these findings are limited in their scope, I argue that continued exploration of these structures by expansion of this methodology and the addition of ethnographic research foreground the interaction between material objects and human relationships in the construction, deconstruction, and preservation of sacred and secular boundaries.

中文翻译：

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转换后的结构：探索神圣和世俗的物质表达

背景

在西方世界，越来越多的传统宗教建筑被改作世俗用途，例如房屋，饭店或表演厅。同时，会众出现在以前的世俗空间中，使古老的购物中心，店面和电影院适应他们的朝拜空间。

目的

这项研究采用一种新颖的方法来确定这些混合建筑的位置，并探讨这些建筑在美国宗教环境中可能意味着什么。

方法

通过使用被识别为潜在的转换结构候选者的地址数据库，我进行了系统地识别这些建筑转换的第一个已知尝试。我使用Google街景工具在美国的六个中型城市中定位这些建筑物。找到这些建筑物后，我使用Google街景视图收集了外观的视觉数据，并确定了建筑物中存在神圣，世俗的形式和功能元素。

结果

基于每次转换中确定的形式和功能要素，我将Hackworth和Gullikson（2013）的转换结构类型进行了扩展，以包括八种潜在的转换类别，其中五种由我的样本案例代表。我找到了175处世俗建筑转换和12座圣世俗建筑转换。在175项世俗至神圣建筑的转换中，有89项建筑属于“世俗形式，混合功能”类别，而86项属于“世俗形式，神圣功能”类别。在12项由圣至俗的建筑转换中，有10项属于“神圣形式，世俗功能”类别，而2项属于“混合形式，世俗功能”类别。此外，虽然不是本研究的最初重点，但我的样本中包括2项建筑转换，这些转换属于“神圣形式”，

结论与启示

尽管这些发现的范围有限，但我认为，通过扩展这种方法论并继续进行人种学研究，可以继续探索这些结构，这是物质对象与人际关系在构建，解构和保留神圣和世俗边界方面的相互作用的前景。 。