How important is the form of a building? How much can the impression it makes on your retina move you, alienate you, create beauty or identity? On the face of it, quite a lot, and it is most of what you see when buildings are published in history books or newspapers or in snapshots in social media culture wars that pit traditional against modern buildings. But in the lived experience of architecture, other qualities are at least as important: how they work, materials and surfaces, the fall of natural and artificial light, detail and craft, scale, acoustics, the relationships of buildings to their human-made and natural surroundings, and to the lives that go on in and around them. Take the difference between a plastic souvenir of the Taj Mahal and the real thing – they are unalike in every way except shape.
This question is prompted by the latest Maggie’s cancer centre at the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead, north London. Its design, by the New York-based Daniel Libeskind, is not exclusively about shape, but that’s what hits you when you see it. It’s a building of undulating, outward-splaying walls punctuated by windows in the shape of scalene quadrilaterals, with a sinuous stair rising through its intentionally fragmented interior. Its finishes, next to the extravagant extraordinariness of the forms, are humdrum: engineered timber cladding on a steel frame, light grey oak floors and white-painted plasterboard inside. An earlier and promising-looking all-timber design was rejected – not for cost reasons, insists Maggie’s, but because its wooden bars looked “too prison-like”.
