The Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta, which has twice won a World Architecture Award for cultural buildings, will open its first public building in the UK 23rd September 2013. Maggie’s Cancer Centre in Aberdeen is the latest in a chain of 14 support centres for Britons affected by cancer. Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres are respite centres located near or adjacent to existing cancer treatment facilities and provide an emotional and informational shelter for patients and their families undergoing the stress of treatment.
The Centres are named after architect and landscape designer Maggie Jencks who died of cancer in 1995. As a cancer patient herself Maggie found hospitals grim and impersonal. “What matters is not to lose the joy of living in the fear of dying,” she once said. She believed cancer patients needed a life-affirming environment and that, Maggie said, depended upon one’s physical space and by extension the design of the building itself. The centres are a continuation of her vision as realized by her husband Charles Jencks.
The Maggies aesthetic is simple: interiors are light and airy, contain a large central kitchen, a living room and private rooms for consultation or rest and above all have a warm, inviting interior which makes one feel better as soon as they walk through the door. As for how that criteria is realized, anything goes. As a result Maggies Centres are arguably the most distinctive public buildings in Britain. The charity has commissioned the brightest and the best, certainly the most visible – Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and Piers Gough among others. The Snohetta structure is a sleek concrete shell wrapped around a courtyard and a warm timber interior.
Using a building to uplift one’s spirits is a continuing debate. Skeptics question architecture’s feel-good properties and argue that Maggie’s funds would be better spent on medical facilities than on respite centres and that the commissions are nothing more than a platform for starchitects to strut their stuff and win awards, which by the way, they do in droves.
Jencks and his Board aren’t saying architecture cures cancer – a well designed staircase will never replace chemotherapy but they do subscribe to, what Jencks calls, the architectural placebo effect, strengthening the patient’s resolve and maybe their immune system by surrounding them in a calming and hopeful environment. “It is my hope, and it was Maggie’s hope,” says Charles Jencks, “to live longer with cancer. I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, wants to live.”
Snohetta’s Aberdeen Centre took two and a half years to complete at a cost of three million pounds. More Maggies Centres are being planned for Leeds, Southampton, Cardiff and Liverpool. Maggies Manchester is presently being designed by Norman Foster.
