Cancer counselling centre in Inverness uses landscape designs of Charles Jencks, husband of cancer victim Maggie
The fourth Maggie’s Centre opens this week in Inverness. Though only 225 m2 and costing £850,000, the counselling centre is a life-enhancing and symbolic fusion of architecture and landscape, designed by Page & Park and Charles Jencks respectively.
Maggie’s Centres were conceived by Jencks and his late wife, Maggie, to help cancer patients transform their confusion and despair into hope and action. The buildings are intended as welcoming and inspiring antidotes to the depressing hospitals that dispense medical treatment.
Presented with a traffic-dominated site in front of Inverness’ Raigmore Hospital, Page & Park decided it needed a garden and asked Jencks for ideas. The result is three spiralling, lens-like forms, two of them landscaped mounds and the third the building. The shapes, Jencks explains, represent healthy cells.
Each mound has a spiral path leading up to a seat at the summit for contemplation. The building resembles a cell in the act of sub-division, which creates a collection of spaces that range in character from intimate to sociable.
“The two ends open up to give vistas into the garden space,” says senior partner David Page. “The interior and exterior become an extension of the same thing.” Another echo of the grassy mounds is found in the spiralling strips of green patinated copper that clad the timber-framed building.
Maggie’s Highlands was built by Morrison Construction, with Gross Max as executive landscape architect, SKM Anthony Hunt as structural engineer, Harley Haddow & Partners as services engineer and Thomas & Adamson as QS.
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