The Space of the Book

[Images: By Roos Aldershoff].

A bookshop constructed inside a converted Dominican church in Maastricht has won an architectural interiors prize.

[Image: By Roos Aldershoff].

The project, by Merkz+Girod Architects, places "a two-story structure in black steel on one side, where the books are kept." This "combination of book complex and church interior [was] deemed particularly successful" by the competition jury.

[Images: By Roos Aldershoff].

Of course, any commercial reuse of a religious structure comes with its fair share of controversy, but this particular renovation seems to do at least two things, each of which inspires something more interesting than outrage.
On the one hand, the project rescues and updates a gorgeous if programmatically obsolete building, thus keeping a certain spatial experience alive (whether or not you would ever have gone there to attend services). On the other hand, it achieves a weirdly ironic overlap in which two cultural spaces, both on the verge of extinction, at least in Western Europe – and I'm referring here to the Christian church and to the bookshop – come together to form a kind of last gasp for either entity.

[Image: By Roos Aldershoff].

It's as if books, sensing that they are even now moving toward a curious state somewhere between resurrection and purgatory, have decided to retreat, repositioning themselves inside the stone vaults of a church – which happily welcomes these learned visitors – and there the books and the church embrace, like doomed friends all too aware of their age, biding their time together amidst the dust and sunlight until another renovation comes through.

(Originally spotted at Dezeen).