Last week Thomas Heatherwick unveiled his design for a Maggie’s cancer-care center in Yorkshire, England, Dezeen reports.
The design resembles a collection of plant-filled pots, aimed to take advantage of the therapeutic effect of plants. Once completed, which is scheduled for 2017, the Yorkshire location will join 18 other Maggie’s Centre branches that have been designed by prominent architects including Snøhetta, OMA, and Richard Rogers.
"Instead of taking away the open space, we wanted to make a whole building out of a garden," Heatherwick told Dezeen about his plan. "The design developed as a collection of large planters defining the building by enclosing a series of shared and private spaces between them."
Though all centers are drastically different, they all have “healing power” in common. Architecture columnist Matt Hickman writes in the Mother Nature Network, “Maggie's Centres provide ‘practical, emotional and social’ support to cancer patients and their families in joyously non-clinical environments that could easily be described as architecturally stunning: bold, beautiful, uplifting, challenging, welcoming, the antithesis of drab and oppressive."
Hickman adds that the well-designed buildings “[instill] patients and their loved ones with a sense of optimism and positivity,” instead of inducing boredom and dread.
The Yorkshire location is planned to offer psychological support, benefits advice, nutrition workshops, relaxation and stress management, art therapy, tai chi, and yoga.
To complete the verdant plan, Heatherwick will work with landscape designer Marie-Louise Agius of Balston Agius.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Research Facility Breaks the Mold
In the market for state-of-the-art biomedical research space in Boston's Longwood Medical Area? Good news: there are still two floors available in the Center for Life Science | Boston, a multi-tenant, speculative high-rise research building designed by Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Boston, and developed by Lyme Properties, Hanover, N.
| Aug 11, 2010
3 Hospitals, 3 Building Teams, 1 Mission: Optimum Sustainability
It's big news in any city when a new billion-dollar hospital is announced. Imagine what it must be like to have not one, not two, but three such blockbusters in the works, each of them tracking LEED-NC Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. That's the case in San Francisco, where three new billion-dollar-plus healthcare facilities are in various stages of design and constructi...
| Aug 11, 2010
Holyoke Health Center
The team behind the new Holyoke (Mass.) Health Center was aiming for more than the renovation of a single building—they were hoping to revive an entire community. Holyoke's central business district was built in the 19th century as part of a planned industrial town, but over the years it had fallen into disrepair.
| Aug 11, 2010
Right-Sizing Healthcare
Over the past 30 years or so, the healthcare industry has quietly super-sized its healthcare facilities. Since 1980, ORs have bulked up in size by 53%, acute-care patient rooms by 77%. The slow creep went unlabeled until recently, when consultant H. Scot Latimer applied the super-sizing moniker to hospitals, inpatient rooms, operating rooms, and other treatment and administrative spaces.
| Aug 11, 2010
Great Solutions: Healthcare
11. Operating Room-Integrated MRI will Help Neurosurgeons Get it Right the First Time A major limitation of traditional brain cancer surgery is the lack of scanning capability in the operating room. Neurosurgeons do their best to visually identify and remove the cancerous tissue, but only an MRI scan will confirm if the operation was a complete success or not.
