Deventer

by Matthew Stadler, Tae Won Yu (Illustrator)

Told in the manner of a well-plotted novel, Deventer asks what becomes possible when architecture moves "higher on the food chain" to lead the planning process.

In the mid-sized Dutch city of Deventer, a routine real estate deal and demolition became the site of innovation in urban design when a cross-disciplinary team of architects, business experts, financiers, artists, and planners, chose to ignore developers' warnings that serious architecture was impossible "during the crisis." Taking charge of the planning process, the team and their client, the Deventer Hospital, designed viable, ambitious architectural solutions for problems the developers and bankers had written off as intractable.

Not all of the endings were happy ones. This book tells the detailed, day-by-day story of how it happened, how architects can work today, how cities can build their future, and how "ordinary people [can] become political [and] make politics their routine and ongoing concern. It is also the story of an American writer discovering an older Dutch city, Deventer, a Hanseatic gem that hides it tough seriousness behind a pretty scrim of historic beauty.

Genres: Architecture

318 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

writer

Reviews

[Brady Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

From a roundup review I did at the end of 2013 on NextCity.


What I wrote about this book:

In Deventer, novelist Matthew Stadler tells the story of a large-scale redevelopment project that has broad implications for the titular Dutch city. In follows the director of a local hospital system, who owns an obsolete building and the large parcel of land on which it sits. The hospital could sell and make a large profit, but the director knows that then the land would get filled with cookie-cutter homes. Instead, he enlists architect Matthijs Bouw to find a way to make a new plan for the site, one that will benefit the whole town while giving the hospital needed income. Bouw cuts a deal with the city that any developer who buys the plot and executes the plan will get the project fast tracked.

NAI 010 publishes a lot of art books, and it shows in this volume. Each chapter begins with a beautiful watercolor. The text allows itself to breathe as it meanders through its subject, with detours into the history of Dutch architecture and planning. The real-life characters are drawn in detail and their relationships traced back to their beginnings. If the book fails in any way, it’s that life rarely follows the neat arcs of novels. By the end, you don’t really quite know what will happen with the project — only that the developer is balking at the deal.

“Stadler also falls down a bit at the critical juncture. The legal structure of what the developer has (or hasn’t) agreed to is hard to follow, and Stadler walks away from this tension the moment he introduces it, shifting his focus instead to another project in Bouw’s. That said, you learn from Bouw along the way that the journey in a project is as important as the outcome, so maybe it doesn’t matter that we don’t know if his plan got executed as it should?

[lex · Rating 4 out of 5]

De Amerikaanse schrijver Matthew Stadler volgt architect Matthijs Bouw tijdens zijn opdracht van de herontwikkeling van twee oude ziekenhuiscomplexen in Deventer. Een uitermate boeiend boek over architectuur, het spel met gemeentelijke planners en projectontwikkelaars, de geschiedenis van Deventer en de rol van architectuur (en architecten) in bredere, historische zin.

[Ajk · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's basically "so what if The Right Stuff, but about urban planning?" And a lot of that is really cool, to see like mundane administrative decisions written about in heroic scale and given some light theoretical context. The author clearly loves these people and what they do, and I have to admire some of the really strange narrative decisions like talking about 2-3 different projects that all have unsatisfying conclusions instead of focusing on a single example. That's how planning works! It's cool to see it in text!
So like the big obvious issues are the fact that it's The Right Stuff, about urban planning: there are 3 female speaking parts, the largest of which is the wife of the protagonist who mostly talks about how great the protagonist is. For a city that according to Wiki is 23% non-Dutch, there are exactly zero non-Dutch perspectives in the book. Our one non-white character (one of the three women characters!) is heroically saved from visa hell by the protagonist, and there's this weird "oh yeah, we can just load her up with tons of work because she has nothing else to do" side note that is gross to read.
So it's basically the dramatic story of a mundane profession, as told by the sort of person who could get that sort of thing published in an art press. I thought it was a lot of fun to read and to enjoy the perspective of, even if it's not the way I would've told these stories in the least. It made me nostalgic for the Netherlands, inspired by urban planning, and just generally feel good about what I do in my day-to-day and that's a pretty good set of outcomes even with the downsides.