This is the first of seven such institutions planned for England (all other centers currently functioning are located in Scotland).
Rogers and his workshop were faced with a daunting task: their construction site was a small piece of land between the parking lot of the huge 1970s hospital complex and the gloomy Fulham Palace Road. To contrast their building, designed to inspire cancer patients with the will to live, this depressing environment, the outer wall of the building was made orange-red, and the building was surrounded by birches and magnolias. At the same time, despite its full of energy, noticeable from afar appearance and considerable size, the new Maggie Center (as, indeed, all institutions of this program) is distinguished by a very pleasant, "abstract home" atmosphere of its internal space.
The mission of all Maggie's centers is not to treat patients, but to support them psychologically and also to advise on all aspects of cancer. Therefore, any visitor to the Charing Cross Center can simply sit in his library, without meeting or talking to any of the staff, if he wants to.
The first floor of the building is smoothly flowing into each other spaces of "living rooms", library and kitchen, planned using a module - a square with a side of 3.6 m (borrowed from the project of the main hospital building). Raw concrete walls are punctuated by wide windows and glass doors opening onto the courtyards of the center. The second floor, where the staff offices are located, is an almost completely glazed space under a flat roof raised above the building.
Almost simultaneously with the opening of the Rogers building in London, Charles Jenks, who is conducting a program to build cancer centers in memory of his wife Maggie Kezwick, who died of cancer in 1995, presented a project for a new institution of this series at a conference in Oxford.
Its authors are architects Wilkinson Air. The new building will be located on the territory of the Churchill Hospital, Oxford, on the slope of a ravine, so its volume will be supported by pillars. It is planned to be completed only by 2012, so the next Maggie Center in England will open in Cheltenham and will be designed by Richard McCormack.
