Coda vzw in Wuustwezel is a unique place. In a new building by noAarchitecten, Coda combines a palliative day centre and a hospice besides offering home care, palliative care and bereavement care. It also houses the headquarters of Netwerk Palliatieve Zorg Noorderkempen (NPZN, Noorderkempen Palliative Care Network) while aiming to be a meeting place for the community. When the Flemish Government Architect and the relevant minister launched a call for ambitious clients in 2012, Coda was selected as one of five Pilot Projects Invisible Care. Coda was assigned an architecture expert, a care expert and a project manager to prepare the project definition and to guide the selection process. Alex de Kind, who started at Coda as project manager and has been its director for two years, gives his views on the pilot project.

Alex de Kind receives me in Coda’s offices. While he prepares coffee, we look out through the large window, between the gabled roofs of the day centre’s living space, over the fields where the morning mist is slowly dissolving in the September sun. De Kind then launches enthusiastically into his ambitions for Coda (and how they are being thwarted by a tangle of regulations), about the spatial translation of ‘well-being’ (he doesn’t like the word ‘care’), and about the importance of the Pilot Projects Care for the future of society.