We may not realise it immediately, but architecture has an impact on our moods and lives: it is indeed true that being in or around buildings with specific functions – think about hospitals, prisons or even schools – do affect us in different ways. If this is a truism, then architecture can be used also in more positive ways, as it happens at The Maggie's Centres.
The first one opened in Edinburgh in 1996, and was inspired by a project by landscape architect Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died of cancer in 1995. Jencks was diagnosed with terminal cancer two years earlier: she was told she had two to three months to live and left to ponder about the devastating news she had just received in a dark and depressing hospital corridor.
"I think that initial shock was certainly the moment when Maggie thought we can do better than this. You don't have to suffer in a corridor on death row having just been told that you are going to die. That was the moment architecture and medicine met in our minds," her husband Charles Jencks, who is co-founder of Maggie's Centres, states in the documentary "Building Hope: The Maggie's Centres", by award-winning director Sarah Howitt.
The documentary is on tonight (and on Sunday 5th November) in New York as part of the ninth edition of the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF), that kicked off last night at the Cinépolis Chelsea (260 West 23rd Street, NYC).
Founded in 2009, the ADFF, the nation's largest film event devoted to this subject, celebrates the creative spirit that drives architecture and design, while educating, entertaining and engaging its audiences. Curated by Director Kyle Bergman, this edition features over 30 feature-length and short films.
"Building Hope" starts with images of a few centres being built and with Norman Foster, the architect behind the Manchester centre, visiting the unfinished structure with Laura Lee, a former nurse to Maggie and now the centres' CEO, and Marcia Blakenham, a friend of Maggie.
In the documentary we meet Maggie through photographs, like the ones taken by David Bailey and Patrick Lichfield in the '60s when Maggie had tried her hand at fashion and had even opened a boutique with a friend. In 1970, Maggie's interest in architecture prevailed, though, and she enrolled in the Architectural Association where she also met her husband, an American architectural writer and landscape architect teaching there.
As the documentary develops, the inspiring story of Maggie turns into a dichotomic power.
The first centre in her name was designed by Richard Murphy and opened in Edinburgh in 1996, but it was when Frank Gehry, another friend of Maggie, designed a striking structure in Dundee in 2003, that other architectural firms decided to join in.
Apart from being the only Gehry building in the UK, the structure is also particularly striking: it is a sort of white cottage building with a crinkled roof inspired by the collar donned by the young woman with a water pitcher in Johannes Vermeer's painting (View this photo). Gehry remembered he had seen the painting with Maggie and decided to come up with a delicate pleated, rather than corrugated, roof.
After Gehry the late Zaha Hadid designed a tiny building in 2006 in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Richard Rogers and Ivan Harbour of Rogers Stirk Harbour, designed the London centre in 2008 and OMA's Rem Koolhaas, the Glasgow centre in 2011.
Then followed Kisho Kurokawa's Maggie's Centre in Swansea (2011), Snohetta's in Aberdeen (2013) and Reiach and Hall in Lanarkshire (2014). The list goes on as the Maggie centres expanded outside the UK as well, opening in Tokyo, and there are now plans to open in The Netherlands and Spain.
The other effect that the centres had was lifting the spirits of the people – cancer patients and their families – who visit them, finding a nice environment where they can relax and contemplate, a shelter and a safe space like the proverbial granny's house.
The buildings are all different, some of them look more conventional, others seem to be shaped like spaceships (think about the Nottingham centre by Piers Gough and with interior design by Paul Smith) that may have landed on earth from a galaxy far away.
The architects involved in designing the centres are given carte blanche, but they do have to follow a brief: each centre should have a welcoming entrance; a space to pause and a office space; a kitchen area with room for 12; one large room and two smaller rooms; a space to lie down and a garden.
The kitchen remains a key feature of the buildings: patients converge in this reassuring non-clinical space to talk about personal issues, find support or simply enjoy a cup or tea or a meal together.
The gardens could instead be interpreted as Maggie's memorials: she was a landscape architect and had a passion for Chinese gardens that she saw as cosmic diagrams. In Portrack, the 18th-century country house in Dumfriesshire she inherited from her parents, she designed "The Garden of Cosmic Speculation", a green space that featured manmade spiralling mounds and lakes carving swirling tongues of water in the land. Maggie's daughter Lily also became a landscape architect and designed the garden for Frank Gehry's Hong Kong Maggie's centre and for Glasgow's second centre.
The structures remain hybrid buildings: they are houses, but they are not homes; they preserve some artworks (the Manchester house features artworks by Eduardo Paolozzi, who was a friend of Maggie), but they aren't museums; they infuse a sense of calmness and peace in the people who visit them like a holy place would do, but they are not religious spaces. Each center runs a support programme - from nutrition classes, to Tai Chi or wig fitting; each person who visits a centre gives it their own individual meaning, as proved by the feedback of the people interviewed in the documentary.
Architecture-wise the most interesting aspect of the documentary is the way the architects involved offered a pluralism of responses and created a series of landmark buildings based on the same ideas and purposes, suggesting different solutions to help improving the mood of people.
Rather than being a passive patient, Maggie became an active force, determined to make the best of her time, without losing "the joy of living in the fear of dying", as she would say, and stubborn enough to find new ways to help other people.
"Bulding Hope" is not just a compelling documentary because it looks at the positive power of architecture, but because it reminds us that more people are surviving cancer nowadays. The centres will therefore keep on developing and transforming, changing with the needs of the patients who visit them. There was no cure for Maggie, but she left therapeutic environments for other people to get better. They may not be the final cure for cancer, but they are strong and powerful antitheses to unwelcoming and dark hospital corridors.
Comments