Maggie’s Centre, the most cancers therapy group with facilities all through the UK, lately opened its latest outpost in Southampton, a metropolis in southwest England. Designed by the London-based agency AL_A, Maggie’s Southampton remodeled a former car parking zone into the brand new oncology unit for Southampton Basic Hospital.
The 4 surrounding gardens, designed by native panorama designer Sarah Worth, are populated by wooden anemones, orchids, celandines, and Scots pine bushes that tower over the location, treating the middle as an oasis separate from the adjoining hospital. Subtly distinct from each other in design and foliage, every backyard was impressed by the wealthy biodiversity of the woodland glades of New Forest Nationwide Park, a close-by 219-square-mile inexperienced house.
“The ambition is for there to be the robust sense that the backyard has at all times been there,” Worth explains on her web site, “a pure haven that gives seclusion and safety from the surface world.”
At a mere 4,500-square-feet, the single-story constructing feels bigger than it actually is owing to a pinwheel flooring plan that visually attracts the encircling gardens inward by way of massive floor-to-ceiling home windows, whereas the outside’s reflective surfaces clad in pounded steel seem to additional dissolve the constructing into the woodlands. The arduous edges of the constructing are softened by a tactile materials palette that features a rippling, earth-toned ceramic, designed in collaboration with Ceramica Cumella to carry out as load-bearing and acoustic insulation, that extends past the inside to divide the gardens into discrete sections in addition to to supply shade.
On the heart of the pinwheel plan is a big kitchen desk (a signature community-building aspect on the coronary heart of all Maggie’s Centres) positioned beneath a round skylight, the one curvilinear design gesture discovered all through the constructing. The personal areas, together with quiet areas and consulting rooms, are of various sizes to host a variety of features and are all situated on the exterior corners of the constructing to attract within the surrounding gardens.
“I’m completely thrilled with our latest centre designed by Amanda Levete and her staff at AL_A,” wrote Dame Laura Lee DBE, chief govt of Maggie’s Centre, in a press launch. “They’ve interpreted our transient superbly and their exacting consideration to element has created a surprising constructing with massive home windows that flood the centre with pure mild. Their play on inside and out of doors house and the shut working relationship with landscaper Sarah Worth has created a backyard that can give folks with most cancers and our employees views of greenery on all sides.”
