‘Maggie's’ are universally beautiful. The centres for cancer patients and their families were established by architect Maggie Keswick, who died of cancer in 1993, and her husband, Charles Jencks. They're intended to be the opposite of the windowless, neon-lit chemotherapy units found in so many general hospitals. Instead, Keswick and Jencks planned an alternative space with views of nature, where patients could sit peacefully between bouts of noxious therapy.
Many of the growing network of Maggie’s, currently at 30, in the United Kingdom, Barcelona, Hong Kong and Tokyo, have been designed by ‘starchitects’ including Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid. They are unique, architecturally striking and linked by design qualities: light, beauty, openness, intimacy, views, connectedness to nature and ‘homely’ in space and feeling. All of this combines to form what Jencks called an “architecture of hope”.
The leap from inspirational Maggie’s to prisons seems incongruous. But prisons have many similarities to hospitals. With incarceration rates on the rise globally, prison architects could look to such pioneering healthcare centres for inspiration on how to do things differently.
