The lecture focuses on Maggie’s Centres, cancer care centres that offer a fresh approach to both architecture and health. The centres are a new mixed building type for healing that have different roots in the past. The ‘architecture of hope’ refers to this emergent hybrid genre, consisting of various metaphors that correspond to the many different types of cancer and their various treatments.
Named after Maggie Keswick and co-founded with her husband Charles Jencks, Maggie’s Centres have been designed by Richard Murphy, Page and Park, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers. Further projects include buildings by Richard MacCormac, Piers Gough, Wilkinson Eyre and Rem Koolhaas.
Charles Jencks lectures, writes and designs in the USA, the UK and Europe. He is the author of the best-selling The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (re-issued as The New Paradigm in Architecture, 2002) and numerous other books on contemporary arts and building, most recently The Architecture of Hope with Edwin Heathcote (Frances Lincoln 2010). His celebrated garden in Scotland is the subject of The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (Frances Lincoln, 2003). He won the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums for his design, Landform Ueda.