Archinect - News

Steven Holl Architects' Maggie's Centre at Barts is now open

2017-12-14T19:27:00-05:00

Over two years after the groundbreaking, the new Maggie's Centre Barts in Central London finally opened earlier this week. Located throughout the UK, Maggie's Centres offer free practical and emotional support for people who live with cancer and their loved ones.

Steven Holl Architects, along with UK firm jmarchitects, designed the 3-story building as a “vessel within a vessel within a vessel”. The new Maggie's Centre replaces a 1960s brick structure, adjacent to a 17th-century stone structure by James Gibbs.

Photo: Iwan Baan.

Built next to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (London's oldest hospital), the Centre's exterior shows off a translucent glass facade that gives the structure a glowing appearance. The facade has colored glass fragments arranged in horizontal bands like a musical staff, in reference to the “neume notation” of 13-century Medieval music, SHA describes.

Photo: Iwan Baan.

The building's translucent facade allows the interior to be filled with natural lig...

How patients would redesign the psychiatric ward

2016-07-25T21:04:00-04:00

[James] Leadbitter called it “a playful and exciting space for redesigning madness, a utopian attempt at what a mental health hospital could be like.” Each structure...is an abstract interpretation of the feedback from the workshops, designed to offer varying levels “of privacy and intimacy ranging from total isolation to complete togetherness.” “This is only a small glimpse of a project that has huge potential to influence the way we think about the design of mental health care environments,”

More than 300 patients, architects, and psychiatrists pitched their ideas on how they would redesign the psychiatric ward for “Madlove: A Designer Asylum”, a collaborative project conceived by artist and activist James Leadbitter, who has suffered from mental illness and has stayed at several psychiatric wards himself. Leadbitter wanted to address the direct negative effects that terribly designed wards have on patients.

Steve Saling, retired landscape architect with ALS, designs residence he can control by blinking

2016-07-08T13:38:00-04:00

Unwilling to accept a life utterly dependent on caretakers, [Steve] Saling designed a series of systems that let patients with ALS control their environment in the assisted living center with ...blinks and facial twitches. “The notable impact that ALS had on my ability to design is speed,” he said. “I am a lot slower. [But] Because much of my profession had been computerized and I excelled in computer-assisted drafting, I was still able to convey my ideas with a lot of precision.”

Read more about amazing architects who never let their disabilities get in their way:

Working out of the Box: Francis Tsai

Francis Tsai, previously featured on Archinect's Working Out of the Box, passes away

Building Voice: Visually impaired architect, Christopher Downey, lectures in Downtown Miami

The nuanced design of deaf spaces

Sick people in Scandinavia can check into these "patient hotels" as hospital alternatives

2015-11-13T15:37:00-05:00

Over the last few years, we’ve all finally admitted that hospitals are depressing, sometimes toxic places...[But] what if the solution is to redesign the building itself?...Since the late 1980’s, hotels—not hospitals—specifically designed for sick people have been popping up throughout Scandinavia. In [some countries,] a patient’s stay is free, covered by national insurance...Accommodations at patient hotels resemble most traditional 3-star hotel properties.

More about health-related design on Archinect:

Jason Danziger heals psychosis with design

How urban designers can better address mental health in their work, according to a new think tank

Preventing disease and upholding public health through architecture

Construction kicks off for Steven Holl-designed Maggie's Centre Barts in London

Michael Graves' Vision: Making Hospitals More Fashionable

Jason Danziger heals psychosis with design

2015-08-13T13:33:00-04:00

Danziger addressed the issues of perception: How does a patient with a shifted perception experience space? He focused on color, the distribution of light, material, and shape.

While designing for medically healthy clients can occasionally drive an architect insane, an entirely different set of challenges is involved in creating a safe and healing environment for mentally ill patients. Architect Jason Danziger found himself asking questions like: what makes a bed recognizable to someone in a clinically altered state of mind? Danziger's resulting design for the Soteria at St. Hedwig Hospital in Berlin, executed as part of an ongoing collaboration with medical director Dr. Martin Voss, won him the 2015 BDA Berlin Prize.

More at the intersection of architecture and mental health:

Update: A previous version of this piece did not mention Dr. Martin Voss' role in the Soteria project.