What Makes an Environment Healing? Users and Designer About the Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre London

When being admitted to a hospital, you largely loose control over your life. Others decide your time schedule, where you go and stay, and what the environment looks like. Ongoing research about healing environments hardly seems to affect the design of current hospital buildings. An exception are the Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres, designed specifically to offer a healing environment.

In our research we explore architecture’s impact on patients’ wellbeing. Through interviews with both the users and designer of Maggie’s Centre London, we confronted the architect’s vision with the daily experience and the actual building. This analysis enables us to start uncovering the meaning of a healing environment. At Maggie’s London the combination of a well thought architectural brief, an engaged architect, and suiting client seem to form the basis for a successful building that is not only designed as healing but is also experienced as such by its users.