Description

Maggie’s Gartnavel was the eighth Maggie’s Centre in the UK. It serves the west of Scotland’s population – an area with a high incidence of cancer. It is located close to Gartnavel General Hospital and also to Scotland’s leading oncology facility, the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre. When OMA – Office for Metropolitan Architecture, based in Rotterdam and led by founding partner Rem Koolhaas – friend and former student of Charles Jencks – and the partner in charge of the project, Ellen van Loon, received the assignment to design a Maggie’s Centre, they decided against creating a piece of iconic architecture. The task at the Glasgow center was to create a small, intimate environment for people who are confronted with an existential crisis.

In the Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow, all rooms have been arranged around a central garden. Seemingly distributed at random, the borders between the spaces are fluent, inviting the center’s users to stroll through the building and enjoy the succession of different scenes. Situated on a hill, the rooms provide views to the campus of the Gartnavel General Hospital and to the city. The center is surrounded by a landscaped zone designed by Lily Jencks, daughter of founder Maggie Keswick Jencks. The interlocking rooms are arranged around a central garden and nature is an essential element of the center. The green spaces outside mark a transition zone that conveys a clear message: here you leave the hospital and enter an entirely different world, one dedicated to support and comfort. Upon entering the center, the succession of spaces – living rooms, larger spaces for social interaction, a library, a kitchen – follows a logic that seeks a balance between privacy and the publicness of the community of patients seeking relief. Key to the plan is an arrangement of L-shaped rooms that are able to accommodate the whole range of emotions the patients experience at different moments during their stay. The room sequence has ramps that follow the topography of the sloping site and individual areas can be closed off by large sliding doors. A concrete roof with a beech ceiling lends coherence to the plan.

The Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow is an architectural icon-in-reverse: it does not make any attempt to impress the outside world and instead focuses entirely on its interior atmosphere. Maggie’s Centre Gartnavel was the first UK building for OMA.

---

Originally published in: Cor Wagenaar, Noor Mens, Guru Manja, Colette Niemeijer, Tom Guthknecht, Hospitals: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2018.