Maggie’s Centre West London

Cor Wagenaar, Noor Mens

Description

The various Maggie’s Centres in Great Britain are drop-in facilities dedicated to providing support and an uplifting environment for patients with cancer. Typically located next to a hospital, they offer a caring environment. Founded by and named after Maggie Keswick Jencks, the wife of architectural theorist Charles Jencks, the first one opened in Edinburgh in 1996 and 15 centers have been built since. Maggie Jencks, who died of cancer in 1995, believed in the ability of buildings to uplift people and it is not surprising that Maggie’s Centres have been designed by leading architects. No formal registration process is required to use the center that typically includes a garden and a kitchen and makes the most of good-quality materials to create a soothing environment.

Maggie’s West London, located on the grounds of Charing Cross Hospital, was opened in 2008. It sits on the front northwest corner of the hospital site, on a busy intersection of roads, bordered by a car park. The bright orange pavilion set within the newly-landscaped grounds was inspired by the concept of a heart enveloped by the protective wrap of a building’s four walls which act as counterpoint to the austerity of the hospital. The floating roof that oversails the outer wall and helps flood the space with light, the protective walls and the windows opening into one of three courtyard gardens, all work to embrace the visitors and draw them into the kitchen, which is at the center of the building. The heart is created by a double-height communal space that serves as an atrium and a piazza, surrounded by a library and a series of large and small sitting and discussion rooms, which are more domestic in scale. Birch-finished plywood and polished concrete floors soak up the daylight that streams in through the glazing, and transitional walls provide the flexible space needed to accommodate both private chats and yoga classes. In creating an intimate but open and welcoming space, Maggie’s West London embodies a new typology of hospital building, one which values the individual above the institution, with healthcare expressed through a holistic experience of nature, light, comfort and togetherness rather than medical processes alone.