Deventer

Can real architecture grow in our own backyard? Can architects grow by working there? In Deventer, the Netherlands, a routine real estate deal and demolition became the site of innovation and new intelligence in urban design. Not all of the endings were happy ones. This is the story of how it happened. As architecture dissolves into the blurry middle ground between individual art practice and urban planning, the professions discourse falls apart. We lack a vocabulary for this hugely important middle ground: projects that are neither local nor global, neither temporary nor permanent, neither original (in the protean sense) nor strictly an act of preservation. The professions outmoded dichotomies local/global, temporary/permanent, new/somehow-not obscure the daily challenge of real working architects. In the small Dutch city of Deventer, a pair of projects recently emerged that help map this middle ground: the creation and sale of an unusual development plan for a disused mid- 20th century hospital complex; and the transformation of a 1956 Catholic hospital monastery into a community health center, Jozef Health Center Deventer. Deventer tells the human story that drove these two projects to their checkered ends, and connects them to broader changes in the professions as a first step toward finding a vocabulary for the new scale of change in architecture.