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

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0711236356 ISBN 13: 9780711236356

Verlag: Frances Lincoln, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Charles Jencks is the author of several best-selling books on architecture. He divides his time between lecturing, writing and designing in the USA, in the UK and in Europe. To visit Charles Jencks' website click here

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Introduction: The Potion of Hope

by Charles Jencks

The Architecture of Hope is the story of cancer caring centres and how they have grown in Britain and elsewhere to become a new kind of institution. Located next to a large hospital, each Maggie’s Centre is a personal, designed place that encourages self-help. The buildings look at the same time striking yet familiar, and their hybrid functional nature has great implications for mass-health today. Each Centre is like a house that is not a home, an existentialist church that is non-denominational, a hospital that is a non-institution, and a place of art that is a non-museum. 

The idea started off, modestly, in 1994, when my late wife Maggie Jencks and I thought of converting a room at the end of a hospital corridor in Edinburgh into one small haven for cancer patients, with a view on to nature, where one could sit peacefully between bouts of noxious therapy. In twenty years it has grown into more than twenty buildings with gardens, and a developed programme of caring activities that help cancer patients help themselves. Maggie would have been amazed at this extraordinary growth, because we only planned one building before she died in 1995; but she did have an inkling of the future, since she wrote a general blueprint for caring centres. What explains their runaway growth, and success?

 

Five factors that helped us grow

The reasons for the progress of Maggie’s as an institution can be debated, and given various priorities, but they would surely include the following five factors. 

First, and most basic, is the widespread need for cancer caring centres around the world, in an epoch when the ‘disease’ affects one in three and rising. In addition, many more people are living longer with cancer than ever before. Thus we are part of a global movement, and the demand for carers will grow insatiably. This also will be true of other major chronic maladies, such as heart disease, dementia, diabetes, strokes and obesity. So the lesson of such caring centres extends well beyond cancer. Simply put, large hospitals – and the many people who are living over ninety years – cannot do without them. Maggie’s Centres have thrived because of this deep, global need. 

A second reason for our intense development is the commitment of a varied Board of Directors – all the volunteers – and a dedicated staff, who are even more varied in make-up. A variety of motives and skills is the key. Teams of different types of people, when they have a common goal, make a charity work well. This is because it takes so many different parts of a personality to carry out all the necessary roles: to care for patients, to raise money, to do the legal work, to decide what values are worth supporting, to smile when you are angry, to smooth ruffled feathers, to fight cancer and to care about caring. 

The architecture of hope, I will be arguing, is a necessary hybrid: many particular things and precise functions that must work for exact problems, not just one big thing. If we take care of the carers, and they take care of the patients, then a virtuous circle of hope is created. Credit is due to our committed staff and Cancer Support Specialists (CSS), our many Local Boards and Centre Heads, those who work in each Centre and make it work. 

Our Centre Heads are especially important, for they are the first person you often meet when you walk in the door, and they oversee the weekly programme (which is shown below as the Tree of Options, in the first chapter, page xxx). Our CEO, Laura Lee, has steered our development for twenty years with the Professio

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Frances Lincoln
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0711236356
• ISBN 13: 9780711236356
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Herausgeber: Jencks Charles
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar