Landscape is usually the poor relation of architecture. It’s the bit that gets squeezed when costs have to be cut, whose designers are under-credited, which is an unfinished, muddy mess when the press are let in to admire a building, and when photographers take their glamour shots. Yet it is often good or bad landscape that makes or breaks a place. A dull building can be redeemed by charming surroundings. The worst thing about dire housing developments is less their repetitive brick boxes than the expanses of asphalt and concrete kerb and the boarded fences and desultory shrubs among which they are set.
In the case of the new Maggie’s cancer care centre in suburban Southampton, it is the landscape, which occupies almost three-quarters of the site, which drives the design. Sarah Price, who co-designed the 2012 gardens at London’s Olympic Park, has made a corner of a hospital car park into a garden inspired by the ecology of the nearby New Forest – pines, birches, mosses, ferns and woodland and heathland fauna. The planting is loose, shaggy and drifting, artfully casual. The idea is to make the garden seem as if it has always been there.
The ground rises at the edges, to remove the need for a fence and to block views of the cars and of the paraphernalia of parking, and while the available space is too small to make you think you are actually in the New Forest, you do feel transported. You sense that you are taken out of daily troubles and put somewhere else entirely. Which, as the role of Maggie’s centres is to comfort and support those with cancer, and their families and friends, is a helpful thing to do. “It’s an emotional gear change,” said one user.
The centre’s building has been designed by Amanda Levete Architects to make the most of the landscape. The single-storey sculpture has a scale and character you could call heightened domestic, like the villas modernist architects have long liked to design for well-off clients. It is organised around something called a pinwheel plan, a device that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe used on houses he designed in the 1920s: everything is at right angles to everything else, but the walls tend to be long, straight, uninterrupted planes that project from the centre towards the exterior and continue out into the garden.
Between them is open space, or glass, such that the space seems to flow from inside and outside with a minimum of interruption. There are views and light in all directions. Those long walls lead the eye outdoors towards an indefinite beyond. The plan also enables a spreading, open interior of a kind that has been found to work well in Maggie’s centres. People with cancer often need privacy, but they also often appreciate a sense of fellowship with others in similar situations.
It could all be a bit intimidating. Mies famously designed at least one house that made his client profoundly miserable with its expensive purism, and he is a favourite bogeyman for haters of modernism. People coping with recent diagnoses and frightening prognoses wouldn’t necessarily appreciate a style now associated with art museums and luxury hotels.
The reality is that it is easeful. The space breaks down at its edges into smaller and more intimate places and eventually into the small private rooms that are also essential places in a Maggie’s. While most of the building is one big room, it has multiple areas within it that have their own mood and their own possibilities for conversation or reflection. It is a landscape (metaphorical, this time) – one place, but with several characters.
These qualities are achieved partly by the choices of furniture usual at Maggie’s centres – good quality, mostly modern and contemporary, but eclectic, with combinations of soft and hard materials, natural and artificial. There is carefully selected art. There is a corner with a wall of poetry books installed by the artist Edmund de Waal.
There is a limited but sensuous range of materials. The walls comprise stacked-up ceramic blocks, made by the 140-year-old Catalan company Cumella, which are hollow inside and profiled on the outside to form ranks of repeating vertical fins. These are glazed in such a way that from one direction you see the natural hue of the clay, from the other a muted colour – pink, pale blue, an impure white. Whereas ceramics are usually used for surface finishes, these blocks, with the help of some steel, do the job of holding the building up.
The floor is polished concrete. It and the ceramic are materials that can be outdoors as well as in, which, together with the views of nature, create an atmosphere that is indoors and outdoors at once. Ceramic and concrete together create a world of reflections, in which patches of sky and foliage are folded into the walls and floor and light bounces up on to the ceiling. Light white curtains filter the sunshine, their vertical folds echoing the rhythms of the ceramic fins.
The flat plaster ceiling at one point curves upwards into a circular opening, an oculus that brings a disc of sunlight into the middle of the space, more arresting for being the only round thing in an otherwise straight-line design. The private rooms have soothing finishes such as cork and fabric. The toilets, well lit from above, have large rectangular tiles – about A4-size – the inherent irregularities of their manufacture bringing a touch of life to the usually sterile space of personal hygiene. In a cancer centre, a toilet may also be a place to cry, so the design makes it civilised.
Throughout, the overall impression is of thoughtfulness and calm. The palette, apart from a bright yellow kitchen unit in the heart of the space, is warm but muted, with a light pinkishness prevailing. Then, outside, there is a bit of glitz. Here, walls are clad in mirror-polished stainless steel, its surface mottled and disturbed like wind-blown water. In these panels, the interior’s play of reflections becomes less subtle: the garden becomes an impressionist blur of green and blue, the straight lines of the ceramic walls liquefy into op-art.
Amanda Levete once worked for Richard Rogers, and, later, with her then-husband, Jan Kaplický, she was a partner in Future Systems, a practice that strove to apply innovative technologies to contemporary buildings. This background puts her in the tradition of British hi-tech, an approach to architecture whose strength was constructional spectacle and technical daring, and whose weakness was the subordination of other experiences and pleasures to those same strengths. In a building such as Rogers’s Lloyds of London, you can gawp at some wonderful trusses and ducts and glass lifts, but you’d do best to overlook the unconsidered and sometimes dank spaces below and between them.
Levete’s current practice is designing the building for a Jeff Bezos-backed nuclear fusion demonstration plant in Oxfordshire. It is best known for the Sainsbury Gallery and Sackler courtyard at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, completed in 2017, in which she and her partners also experimented with ceramics. The straight-line Southampton Maggie’s is in some ways its simplest work to date. It sublimates the spectacle of hi-tech into sensuality, and turns attention from itself to the garden. Its low exterior is inconspicuous among the planting.
It is well tuned to the needs of a Maggie’s. Its crazed stainless steel and big sheets of glass are potentially the devices of a cocaine baron’s lair, but here are very much not. Some Maggie’s suffer from an excess of architectural rhetoric, an effect of their fondness for hiring big-name practices, and perhaps of the benefits to fundraising (Maggie’s being a charity reliant on donations) of splashy buildings. The Southampton Maggie’s is far from being shy and retiring – the architecture makes a powerful impression – but it sustains rather than overwhelms its purpose.
In 1955, the celebrated architectural writer Ian Nairn set off from a Southampton suburb somewhere near the Maggie’s site, on a drive to the outskirts of Carlisle. It was for a special issue of Architectural Review, and later a book called Outrage, a lament about the impoverishment of landscape and townscape, what he called “Subtopia”. His point was that you could travel from the south of England to the north-west and end up in a suburb very much like the one where you had started. Local character and sense of place had disappeared. This Maggie’s, by contrast, belongs to its location. It does this not through imitation of some imagined Hampshire vernacular, but through the interaction of landscape and architecture.
