MAGGIE’S CENTRE BY OMA

The Maggie's Centre in Glasgow has been named Scotland's best building at the nation's annual “architectural Oscars”, held in the Scottish Parliament.

“The aim of a Maggie's centre is to provide an environment of practical and emotional support for people with cancer, their families and friends. Since the opening of the first Maggie's in Edinburgh in 1996, the Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres foundation has grown substantially, commissioning and developing a series of innovative buildings designed by world class architects.

While contemporary architecture has a reputation, deservedly or not, for being at times cold or alienating, the goal of each Maggie's Centre – whether in Glasgow, London, or Hong Kong – is to provide a space where people feel at home and cared for, a space that is warm, receptive, and welcoming.

Maggie's Centres rely on the fundamental precept, often overlooked, that exceptional architecture and innovative spaces can make people feel better – thereby kindling the curiosity and imagination fundamental to feeling alive.

Grand in their ambitions, but designed on a small scale, Maggie's Centres provide a welcome respite from typical institutional hospital architecture. Their spaces are more than merely functional; they serve as a haven for those receiving treatment.

In creating a place to connect and learn from others who are going through similar experiences, Maggie's help patients to develop their sense of confidence and resourcefulness. In 2007, Maggie's approached OMA to design a new centre on the grounds of Gartnavel hospital in Glasgow, close to the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre. OMA designed a single-level building in the form of a ring of interlocking rooms surrounding an internal landscaped courtyard.

Seemingly haphazardly arranged, the building is actually a careful composition of spaces responding to the needs of a Maggie's Centre and providing a refuge for those coping with cancer. Instead of a series isolated rooms, the building is designed as a sequence of interconnected L-shaped figures in plan that create clearly distinguished areas – an arrangement that minimises the need for corridors and hallways and allows the rooms to flow.

The plan has been organized for the spaces to feel casual, almost carefree, allowing one to feel at ease and at home, part of an empathetic community of people. At the same time the design also provides spaces for more personal moments – either in the intimate setting of the counselling rooms, or in smaller nooks and private spaces.

Located in a natural setting, like a pavilion in the woods, the building is both introverted and extroverted: each space has a relationship either to the internal courtyard or to the surrounding woodland and greenery, while certain moments provide views of Glasgow beyond.

With a flat roof and floor levels that respond to the natural topography, the rooms vary in height, with the more intimate areas programmed for private uses such as counselling, and more open and spacious zones for communal use. More than any other space, the internal courtyard provides a place of sanctuary and respite.” Description from architects.

 

Location: Glasgow, Scotland

Architect: OMA

Partners in charge: Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon

Associate In Charge: Richard Hollington Iii

Project Team: Atsuo Arii, Josh Beck, Alexander Giarlis, Stephen Hodgson, Takuya Hosokai, Maria-Chiara Piccinelli, Koen Stockbroekx

Implementation Architects: Keppie

Structure: Sinclair Knight Merz

Services: Kj Tait Engineers

Landscape: Lily Jencks

Fixed Shelves: Vincent De Rijk Year: Completed September 2011
Client: Maggie Keswick Jencks Cancer Caring Centres Trust

THE GARDEN OF COSMIC SPECULATION BY CHARLES JENCKS

Located in the grounds of Portrack House, near Dumfries in South West Scotland, it is a private garden created by renowned landscape architect Charles Jencks – he who designed the distinctive Landform at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

The Scots-American has taken his concepts still further in his own private garden, which is open to the public for only one day of the year.

Inspired by the universe, science and mathematic formulae with themes such as black holes, comets and DNA, the Garden's vast sculpted earth works, lakes and engineered structures are an impressive tribute to the mysterious universe which inspired them.

Jencks recalls: "When we began the garden, I was not concerned with the larger issues of the cosmos. But over the years, they came more and more to the fore and I have used them as a spur to think about nature and to contemplate and speculate on the origins of the universe. And in that respect, this garden is part of a long historical tradition. Japanese Zen gardens, Persian paradise gardens, the English and French Renaissance gardens played out the story of the cosmos as it was understood then. So the idea of the garden as a microcosm of the universe is quite a familiar one. In fact, I feel it is the most compelling motive to create a garden. What is a garden if not a celebration of our place in the universe?"

Forty major areas, gardens, bridges, landforms, sculptures, terraces, fences and architectural works.  Covering thirty acres in the Borders area of Scotland, the garden uses nature to celebrate nature, both intellectually and through the senses, including the sense of humor. 

A water cascade of steps recounts the story of the universe, a terrace shows the distortion of space and time caused by a black hole, a "Quark Walk" takes the visitor on a journey to the smallest building blocks of matter, and a series of landforms and lakes recall fractal geometry.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is not a conceptual or even a symbolic garden — it is a demonstration garden, in which features are created in order to replicate physical expressions of cosmological theory in a highly literal manner, in the way of those little red molecule balls connected by sticks, so beloved of chemistry teachers.

In this sense the garden has more in common with a taxonomically arranged Renaissance botanical garden (Pisa or Padua) than an artistically nuanced place such as Little Sparta.

It has to be said that as time has gone on, the slightly hectoring tone of the garden has only increased. It verges on absurdity in the new cascade, for example, which purports to tell the story of the entire universe in its terraces, much as an evangelical 18th-century garden owner once tried to tell the story of Pilgrim’s Progress in his domain.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is no longer a dialogue with the universe, it is a monologue about the universe. It is becoming The Garden of Comic Extrapolation, and someone needs to say it.