Analysing 'The Architecture of Hope':
Page 12: ‘waiting in itself is not so bad – it’s the circumstances on which you have to wait that count. Overhead (sometimes even neon) lighting, interior spaces with no views out and miserable seating against the walls all contribute to extreme mental and physical enervation. Patients who arrive relatively hopeful soon start to wilt’.
Describing the experience of waiting in a hospital corridor. Explains the extent poor architecture can evoke deterioratitve effects even on people who initially were well. Page 13: ‘Informal, like a home, Maggie’s Centre is meant to be welcoming, domestic, warm, skittish, personal, small-scaled and centred around the kitchen or place to make coffee and tea. The centrality of food and drinks allows people to enter and exit without declaring themselves, try things out, or leave without being noticed’. Page 14: ‘If one focuses on the variety of functions then the typical Maggie’s Centre can be seen as a non-type. It is like a house which is not a home, a collective hospital which is not an institution, a church which is not religious and an art gallery which is not a museum. At least four different building types are combined in this hybrid, and the amalgam makes them more effective in carrying forward their work. Why? For one thing it creates a sense that everyone is in it together … This informal continuity, the mixture, overcomes the sense of isolation’.
Maggies Centre do not uphold a certain typology - they have taken the essence of key environments and implemented them to create a 'super-environment', designed in the most effective way to convey the proposed feel.
Page 22: ‘The result in the first centre at Edinburgh is a set of intimate spaces, with light and views penetrating in unexpected places. Conceptually it has the tight layered space of a Chinese garden.’ Page 29: ‘Maggie’s Centres have always sought a site with some planting and dramatic landscape as close to the big hospital as possible’. Page 34: ‘If these small buildings are mini-icons, ad multiple metaphors, then it raises the question of content. To what do the metaphors allude, to what iconography do the icons relate? All the buildings taken as a group are colourful and basically upbeat: the war on cancer is not the primary note they strike. Their domesticity and slightly unusual shape suggest they might be the friendly clubhouse of an obscure religious sect dedicated to golf’. Page 34: ‘When Zaha Hadid’s design was opened in Fife, in 2006, there was an outcry among few architects who saw in the black angular shapes the metaphor of war and pain, Darth Vader and death … much of the criticism came from those who had only seen the photographs … First of all the black asphalt-like surfaces … The black material has a much warmer quality than macadam, containing a silver fleck, and this makes the feeling more intimate and friendly.
Despite its ultimately provoking appearance, the elements of calm lie within the subtly of the materiality used.
(Heathcote E. and Jencks, C., 2010. The Architecture Of Hope' - Maggies Cancer Caring Centres. Frances Lincoln.)