28 July 2010 - 4 September 2010

Intimate Spaces, Material Lives

Since the mid-1990s an exciting building project has been underway, new cancer caring centres that offer a fresh approach in 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 at all the major British hospitals that treat cancer. Already six have been completed and six more are in the pipeline. Starting in Scotland, where the first were built, they have implications well beyond their modest size and origins. Complementary to the large hospital, and huge National Health Service, they present a face that is welcoming, risk-taking, aesthetic and spiritual; and with their commitment to the other arts, including landscape, they bring in the full panoply of constructive means.

The “architecture of hope” is a new hybrid genre emerging with Maggie’s Centres, and a multiple metaphor that corresponds in kind to the many different types of cancer and their various treatments. Such caring centres, offering psychological, social and informational guidance, will inevitably grow in the future with an aging population, and cover the myriad of chronic problems such as heart disease. Because the genome project increases choice of treatment, cancer caring centres are a model for what may soon become a standard building type. The Centres have been designed by well known architects Richard Murphy, Page and Park, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers. Further projects underway include buildings by Richard MacCormac, the late Kisho Kurokawa, Piers Gough, Wilkinson & Eyre and Rem Koolhaas.

This exhibition celebrates the artistic vision of the buildings through a display of the architectural models, photographs and stories.