Maggie's Hong Kong

Designing the Maggie's Centre, Hong Kong

Lily Jencks, daughter of Maggie Keswick Jencks received her training in architecture and landscape architecture in the United States and is now practicing in London and Scotland. Here she discusses the design process for Maggie's Hong Kong.

The wind gently rustles the leaves, shadows flutter on a white wall and the reflection of sun on a rippling pond dances against the stone. This experience of calm and respite is hard to imagine in the surrounding context of hospital institutions and impersonal high-rises. Maggie's Centre at Tuen Mun Hospital provides a place to consider the difficult journey of cancer treatment, find new friends with whom to face the struggle, and be in an environment that makes you feel considered and care for. An important role in creating this atmosphere is the design of both the architecture and landscape, providing a warm, loving environment.

Maggie's Centre Hong Kong will sit on what was originally a grassy mound at the end of a long lawn near the Tuen Mun Hospital oncology unit. This site was chosen partly for the location's existing feeling of calm, provided by a grove of mature trees and a grass lawn that can act as a borrowed garden, giving a dappled green view in this densely populated area. In designing Maggie's we sought to use the existing site to its full advantage; we consulted the "genius of the place". The building is arranged as pavilions in a garden, organised to ceate a continuous flow between interior and exterior. The interior rooms fold into the landscape or "pop out" with a private terrace over the pond. The public kitchen room, where someone is perennially making tea or busy with some light cooking, is central to the building, providing a friendly group focus with views out over the ponds and gardens to each side. This could be a Chinese Garden in the Suzhou tradition, but the architecture and landscape do not only abide by traditional rules. Maggie's takes the experience of calm, the reciprocity between nature and man and the prominence of intimate spaces of quiet contemplation found in this traditional design and create something quite new.

The building itself acts as a bridge over a pond, with four distinct gardens on each side. Sharp orange bodies of carp twist under the water of the two ponds. one pond is orientated towards the lawn, reflecting the view of distant mountains. The consulting rooms overlook this pond, each with a private view. On the other side of the building, the pond is a quiet internal garden surrounding a library "quiet room", accessible by a short bridge. The path over the bridge takes you on through the garden, weaving through many places to sit with native flowering plants and trees: habitats for birds and people alike. This side of the garden - away from the lawn - is walled to provide some protection from a busy road, but also to create an intimate feel. The sensations to be found at Maggie's are not extravagant but of a quiet dignity. The building and the garden, the plants and the materials, have all been designed to give heart and strength; it is a place to find beauty in your surrounding and the 'joy of living'.