The Architecture of Hope: Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres - Tapa dura

"I feel very fortunate to have known Maggie Jencks and I include her family. The building I designed in Scotland for Maggie’s Centre in Dundee was not designed with her involvement. In fact, it is quite possible she would never have asked me to do one for her since her tastes were at variance with my work. I kept that in mind throughout my design process and threw out a few schemes that at the time I liked better imagining that she would not have liked them. When you know somebody like Maggie you don’t want to disappoint her, whether she is alive or not. It turns out that that little Maggie’s Centre in Dundee, looking back, was one of the best things I’ve ever done. So even though I collaborated, through time and space in my imagination, with Maggie, I’m very proud of the outcome. It’s sensational what has been the result of Maggie’s Centres where they are built. And I think the members of my profession who have donated their services share in the pride of Maggie’s dream." — Frank Gehry

"Maggie's Centres suggest that architecture can change the way we feel, and the way we experience our day-to-day life. This book is an important testament to the success of the many centres that have been realized, as well as presenting new proposed centres." — Steven Holl

"It is commonly thought that there are two kinds of architecture; one is sociable and useful; the other, putting form first, is called startitecture and is assumed to be less sensitive to need and even destructive to health. The Maggie’s buildings show us that having high architectural and compositional aims can celebrate usefulness and thereby contribute to human joy and health." — Ted Cullinan

THE ARCHITECTURE OF HOPE focuses on an exciting building project that has been underway since the mid-1990s - new cancer caring centres that offer a fresh approach to both architecture and health. 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 NHS 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 have been designed by celebrity architects, including Richard Murphy, Page and Park, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Richard MacCormac, the late Kisho Kurokawa, Piers Gough, Wilkinson Eyre and Rem Koolhaas. Additional Centres are being planned by Norman Foster & Partners, Thomas Heatherwick and Steven Holl.

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.

This is a new edition of The Architecture of Hope, first published in 2010, but now completely updated and redesigned with new material throughout, and additional essays about the role of art at Maggie's and about the gardens and landscaping. There is also a new section showcasing the way architecture students have responded to the Maggie's brief.