Cutting-edge new look for cancer care at Maggie's

Published on Thursday 29 April 2010 23:11

DRAMATIC designs for seven new Maggie's centres providing care for cancer victims across the UK were unveiled yesterday.

The network of care centres, which began in Edinburgh in 1996, includes a building compared to a "cosmic whirlpool" overlooking Swansea Bay in Wales and another fashioned from intersecting oval walls in Nottingham.

The Maggie's centres were launched to provide uplifting and comforting places to care for cancer victims and their families, typically situated close to treatment hospitals and designed by some of the world's leading architects.

The movement to build the cancer information and care centres is named for Maggie Keswick Jencks, the late wife of Scottish architect and landscape artist Charles Jencks.

Seven new centres, from Glasgow and Lanarkshire to the Cotswolds, are all due for completion within two years, it was announced yesterday.

They include projects by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas of OMA, and other notable architects including Sir Richard MacCormac, whose firm's work has ranged from the British Embassy in Thailand to the soaring Whittle Arch in Coventry

Each centre will cater to a population of about two million people.

Mr Koolhaas is designing Maggie's Gartnavel, in Glasgow, planned at the new Beatson Cancer Centre site at Gartnavel Hospital. "We accepted the commission with eagerness, " said Mr Koolhaas, whose work ranges from arts centres in Rotterdam to the Media Centre for the Beijing Olympics.

"I don't think it should be a building that challenges people to live better; rather it should have a direct effect on the people who use it. The centre will have a holistic feel and hopefully will provide respite and comfort for people."

The Glasgow centre is described as a series of L-shaped rooms around a courtyard.

"It looks like one of his most interesting buildings and I look forward to seeing it," said Scots architect Richard Murphy, designer of the Edinburgh centre.

"The Maggie's centres are now a brilliant success story. You only have to go to them and talk to the people who use them. It's entirely funded privately, with no National Health Service money." The stunning centres also raised questions about the design standard of NHS buildings, he said.

In 2009 Maggie's centres opened their doors to more than 79,000 people, 67 per cent of whom were cancer sufferers and 33 per cent family and friends of someone with the condition. There are six in Britain and four temporary centres, including one in Barcelona.

By 2015 it is hoped to have a centre on almost half of Britain's NHS cancer centre sites, with 23 centres open or in development across the UK.

The Swansea site was designed by Kisho Kurokawa, one of Japan's leading architects. Plans for his spiral concept, compared to a "cosmic whirlpool", were completed before he died in 2007 and the work is being carried on by his firm.

Maggie and Charles Jencks' daughter, Lily, an architect and landscape architect, is designing gardens for the centres in Glasgow and Hong Kong. She said recently: "I feel so proud of Maggie's and I am just doing as much as I can to help them now and give back as much as I can."