A collective vegetable garden at the tax office: how architecture can heal

Architecture is about creating space, but new construction often involves demolition, and construction is responsible for 40 percent of global CO2 emissions. With the theme Healing Sites, the Prix de Rome Architecture challenges young designers to reflect on the destructive side of architecture. At a location of your choice, they show how architecture can help to ‘heal’. Four plans were nominated from 53 submissions, which can now be seen in an exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. The winner will be announced December 1 .

Arna Mačkić: collective recovery from architectural disasters

For the Bosnian-Dutch architect Arna Mačkić, who fled to the Netherlands with her family during the war in Yugoslavia as a child, ‘healing’ is a well-known theme. That’s how she wrote the book Mortal Cities & Forgotten Monuments about the connecting power of architecture in war-ravaged cities.

As a teenager she attended a session at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She saw how war criminals told their story, while no ‘solution’ was offered for victims. This experience gave her the idea of ​​transforming the complex in which the tribunal is located into a public center for the collective recovery of ‘structural disasters’, such as in the gas extraction area in Groningen.

Mačkić demolishes the building down to its foundations and constructs a square around a circular pavilion with communal mediation rooms, where victims of ‘designed misadventures’ can speak out. There are also workplaces where architects can exchange ideas and insights about recovery, which – together with the documented stories of victims – are kept in a publicly accessible depot, designed as a hundred-meter long disc.

These alternative proposals for shaping the built environment offer new prospects for the future to all those involved

Dividual: space to do absolutely nothing

Thinking about the verb ‘healing’, derived from ‘health’, landscape architects Andrea Bit and Maciej Wieczorkowski of the Dividual agency wondered what actually is healthy. They became fascinated by the peat colony in Veenhuizen, Drenthe, where orphans, the homeless and the poor were ‘cured’ in the 19th century by having them work on the land. The social experiment failed. Yet the idea that hard work is healthy is still ubiquitous – even if the increase in (work) stress and burnouts tells a different story.

With their utopian plan Celebrating the unproductive wants Individual giving a new, communal meaning to work and an alternative interpretation of ‘public benefit’, as a path to collective recovery. They developed a cooperative model in which living, working and leisure activities go hand in hand. Residents purify their own water, build with production wood from the forest, grow food and generate (solar) energy in four specially designed pavilions. Each building also includes a recreational function; you can bathe in the water pavilion and there is a ‘tavern’ in the greenhouse. Diagonally across the location, the designers delineate a wide strip of land where nothing is done at all and nature takes over.

Lesia Topolnyk: the MH17 trauma made tangible

When you step into the largely black exhibition space, you feel that something bad is going on here. On coal pedestals you can see a metal propeller, bullets and a mine shaft. The sculptures depict the mining village of Hrabove, which became world news when flight MH17 was shot down there in 2014. With the ‘deconstruction’ of this location, the Ukrainian architect Lesia Topolnyk wants to provide insight into what happened here and how it could happen.

No innocent landscape is the only entry without a design. Topolnyk sees it as her task as an architect to make tangible abstract concepts such as geopolitics, climate change and globalization, which interlock in this conflict zone. Only then can the trauma be closed and a sensible reconstruction take place, she says. Based on the realization that many people cannot read maps or models, her project focuses on spatial experience and atmosphere. Using a film, drawings and sculptural objects, Topolnyk tells the story of the illegal mining in the village, the fight for borders, the crashed plane and the lost dreams of passengers.

Studio Kiwi: reviewing the tax office

Two mountains of blue envelopes are the cartoonish eye-catchers in the presentation by Studio Kiwi, the office of landscape architects Kim Kool and Willemijn van Manen. When they thought of ‘healing’, they immediately thought of climate recovery, but they see that plans for wind turbines or nitrogen reduction are bogged down in protests because confidence in the government has disappeared; so that needs to be fixed first. To start with the Tax and Customs Administration, which became a symbol of the breach of trust due to the benefits affair.

Research into twenty tax offices led to the diagnosis that there is a lack of public meeting spaces. These have been cut back or digitized over time, and not without consequences; scientific research shows that people who do not see each other feel less compassion and are inclined to punish harder.

Responding to the existing buildings, the architects have developed a ‘toolbox’ with spatial instruments to close off the trauma caused by the benefits affair and to prevent misunderstandings. At the office in Almelo they place a huge megaphone for complaining citizens and tax officials, in Rotterdam they address the endless waiting for a solution with a row of blue chairs where you have to pull a number that never comes up. The only tax building that does function, Doetinchem, is enriched by the designers with a collective vegetable garden.

Exhibition Prix de Rome Architecture, until 9 April 2023, Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.