Architecture of Hope – Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres, by Charles Jencks and Edwin Heathcote, Francis Lincoln Limited Publishers, £35, FT Bookshop price: £28
Within minutes of receiving the news that she had three months to live, Maggie Jencks was back in the neon-lit, windowless hospital corridor. Despite her determination to beat cancer, Maggie found that the unprepossessing environment in which she had treatment wilted her hopeful, positive outlook. Far from simply bemoaning the situation, Maggie, a landscape gardener, and her architecture critic husband Charles developed a blueprint of the kind of nurturing, more homely atmosphere they felt was lacking in hospitals.
This book, which is wholly persuasive in putting forward the merits of architecture for health, tells the story of how Maggie’s Centres came into being, from the initial idea to a series of major projects involving world-renowned architects such as Richard Murphy, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. In contrast to the “antiseptic architecture” of many hospitals, the history of which FT architecture critic Edwin Heathcote deftly recounts in one chapter, the Jencks’ envisioned a more comfortable, non-institutionalised environment, with big windows looking out on to a green space – a place where patients could arm themselves with information, meet fellow sufferers and attend relaxation classes. The Architecture of Hope deserves a look for the innovative building designs alone. Perhaps most interestingly, however, it shows how much architecture can influence the way people feel.