Ground was broken on 9 November 2010 for the new Maggie’s Centre – a facility in Glasgow providing emotional and practical support for people living with cancer, their families and friends.
As opposed to a series of isolated rooms, the building is designed by Dutch architectural partnership OMA as a sequence of interconnected L-shaped figures that create clearly distinguished areas. This arrangement minimizes the need for corridors and hallways and allows the rooms to flow from one to another.
The single-level, 534 square metre building is conceived as a ring of interlocking, carefully composed spaces that are designed to provide moments of comfort and relief. 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 personal uses such as counseling, and more open and spacious zones providing areas to gather and creating a sense of community.
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, landscaped courtyard or to the surrounding woodland and greenery, while certain moments provide views of Glasgow beyond.
The project, led by partners-in-charge the Pritzker Prize winning architect Rem Koolhaas of OMA, Rem Koolhaas, and Ellen van Loon, and associate-in-charge Richard Hollington, will be completed in mid-2011. Lily Jencks, daughter of Maggie’s Founders, Maggie Keswick Jencks and Charles Jencks, will design the internal courtyard plantings and the wooded glades areas surrounding the centre.
The building, which is located on the grounds of Gartnavel hospital and close to the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre, is one of several Maggie’s Centres in the UK and part of a pioneering project using thoughtful architecture and innovative spaces as tools for solace and healing. Maggie’s Gartnavel will serve the West of Scotland Cancer Network, which has a population of 2.5 million people and approximately 4,350 new diagnoses of cancer per annum.
The Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres foundation, founded by Maggie Keswick Jencks and Charles Jencks, opened the first Maggie’s Centre in Edinburgh in 1996, and has since commissioned a series of innovative buildings designed by world-class architects. The foundation approached OMA to design the Glasgow site in 2007.
