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Encompassing a diverse arts programme, Arnhem's new Cultmirhuis has a spatial and textural richness that seeks to consolidate the city's diffuse historic centre
CRITICISM
ELLIS WOODMAN
Operation Market Garden was a calamitous campaign fought by the Allies in the Second World War - a bid to invade Germany by a massive airdrop onto Dutch soil in September 1944. Some 30,000 paratroopers were tasked with seizing bridges spanning the Rhine but, hampered by an overstretched supply line, soon found themselves outnumbered and outgunned. The medieval city of Arnhem was the site of a particularly crushing defeat, requiring the evacuation of what remained of the British First Airborne Division after its failure to seize Arnhem Road Bridge. That battle and the following Allied bombing effectively robbed the city of its waterfront.
A programme of reconstruction began in the 1950s but with results that were less than happy. Poorly built and doing little to re-establish the historic centre's relationship to the river, the area struggled economically and eventually fell into dereliction. At the turn of the century, Arnhem tried again to address the difficult urban legacy of the war years, commissioning a redevelopment plan from the Spanish architect and urbanist Manuel de Solà-Morales. That scheme's key feature was a new pedestrian route leading from the peripherally located station to the historic centre's principal monument, the 15th-century St Eusebius's Church. For much of its length, the route was planned to extend along the line where old towrn and postwar redevelopment encountered one another, forming a suture which would animate the run-dowoi buildings to either side with newr activity. At one point it would also run past a newr marina which would reconnect the historic city with the water.
Yet after a decade in development, the plan was abandoned following the city's failure to commit to the necessary expropriation of property required to establish the route. It was a frustrating outcome but Solà-Morales's work did at least precipitate the realisation of one substantial built project. The masterplan identified two sites on the route suitable for the construction of public facilities: an arts quarter, and a knowledge quarter focused around the construction of a library. This latter project had two significant factors in its favour. The first was that its...