Named after Maggie Keswick and co-founded with her husband, the writer and landscape designer Charles Jencks, these centres aim to be situated at all the major British hospitals that treat cancer. Already sixteen have been completed, with at least seven more the pipeline. Starting in Scotland, where the first were built, they have implications well beyond their modest size and origins. Complementary to public UK hospitals, they present a face that is welcoming, risk- taking, aesthetic and life-affirming; and with their commitment to the other arts, including landscape, they bring in the full panoply of constructive means. Maggie's Centres are a new mixed building type for healing that have different roots in the past. As Jencks and Heathcote show, this hybrid quality is a response to the condition of cancer; its myriad causes and bewildering number of possible therapies. The 'architecture of hope' is this new emergent hybrid genre, consisting of various metaphors that correspond in kind to the many different types of cancer and their various treatments.
The Centres are committed first to helping cancer sufferers help themselves, to inspiring carers to care more, and secondly to architecture. It is the arts and building, important allies in the perennial struggle with cancer, that lead to the 'architecture of hope'. As people walk into a centre after a diagnosis, or enervating treatment, often disoriented and lacking in self-confidence, they enter another world which acknowledges their importance and a basic condition that may become prevalent: living with cancer and not losing hope.
