A flagship cancer care facility in Scotland has won one of the world’s leading architectural prizes.
Maggie’s Gartnavel, designed by Dutch Architects, OMA, picked up the 2012 Doolan Award .
The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland Awards was established in 2002 to find and celebrate the best buildings in Scotland and has since becoming one of the most significant design prizes in the world.
The accolade sees OMA pick up a prize of £25,000, which it has donated to Maggie’s to support its continuing work with cancer sufferers and their families.
Maggie’s chief executive, Laura Lee, said: “It is an enormous pleasure to have won the Doolan Award for our Maggie’s Centre in Gartnavel and incredibly generous of OMA to donate the prize to us.
At Maggie’s we place a great emphasis on the benefits of good architecture and design and Maggie’s Gartnavel, with its interconnected rooms, encourages our visitors to explore the building in contrast to the narrow corridors and hallways of many hospitals
“At Maggie’s we place a great emphasis on the benefits of good architecture and design and Maggie’s Gartnavel, with its interconnected rooms, encourages our visitors to explore the building in contrast to the narrow corridors and hallways of many hospitals.”
“Our centre visitors regularly tell us how much they enjoy the building because it is welcoming, light and spacious.”
Maggie’s Gartnavel is a single-level building designed in the form of a ring of interlocking rooms surrounding an internal landscaped courtyard, which overlooks the hospital site and city from its position atop a hill on the Gartnavel Hospital site.
Seemingly haphazardly arranged, it is actually a carefully considered composition of spaces responding to the needs of its users. The interconnected L-shaped figures create clearly distinguished areas – an arrangement that minimises the need for corridors and hallways and allows the rooms to flow one to another easily.
The centre, which opened in October 2011 and was built by Dunne Group, is located a stone’s throw from Scotland’s leading oncology facility, the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre, which serves a population of 2.8 million people - 60% of Scotland’s population.
Our centre visitors regularly tell us how much they enjoy the building because it is welcoming, light and spacious
Centre head, Gillian Hailstones, said: “It is a huge honour to have the centre at Gartnavel named as the award winner.
“The other buildings on the shortlist were incredible, so to have been selected as the best among them is quite extraordinary, although like all those who visit and work in the centre know, it really is quite an inspirational and unique building.”
OMA partner-in-charge, Ellen van Loon, added: “The Maggie’s Centre in Gartnavel is a special project for OMA. It is very different to the types of buildings that we usually design as we thank the RIAS for this significant recognition.”
Complementing the centre’s internal design is landscaping consisting of internal courtyard plantings and a surrounding wooded glade area, designed by Lily Jencks, daughter of Maggie’s founders, Maggie Keswick Jencks and Charles Jencks, in conjunction with the landscape architecture and urban design company HarrisonStevens.
