‘A space of their own’: cancer centres designed by top architects bring hope to patients

Exhibition at the V&A Dundee celebrates Maggie’s Centres created by Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and others Maggie Keswick Jenks received her weekly breast cancer treatment in a windowless neon-lit room in Edinburgh’s Western General hospital. Her husband, the renowned landscape designer Charles, described it as a kind of “architectural aversion therapy”. It was then, in the early 1990s, that the Scottish artist and garden designer imagined her own blueprint that would allow cancer patients “a space of their own” within the alienating, clinical confines of the hospital estate, one where they might “not lose the joy of living in the fear of dying”. Continue reading...