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The architect of optimism

Can a building give you hope? Daniel Libeskind has designed a new haven for people with cancer in north London

February 8, 2024 12:32
Daniel Libeskind GettyImages-130229719
Daniel Libeskind (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

ByStephen Games , Stephen Games

6 min read

If, like our King, you have the misfortune to be diagnosed with cancer, then you may find help and support at a Maggie’s Centre, named after the late writer and garden designer Margaret Keswick, who died in 1995.

As the King had tests in hospital, the Queen was opening the most recent branch, in the grounds of the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, north London. Like the other 24 around the UK, it provides restful, quiet spaces where people can come and sit, think and read, get advice on health and funding, or simply help themselves to coffee and tea in the ground-floor kitchen area —the focal point of all the Maggie’s Centres.

Each centre is designed by an architect whom Keswick and her late husband, the architectural critic Charles Jencks, admired for their creativity and independence. The centre at the Royal Free was designed by the Jewish Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, who argues that in life, as in architecture, there are many more outcomes—and many happier outcomes — than those that fate seems to prescribe for us. For some people with cancer, that’s a promise that may hold out false hope but it’s more welcome than the opposite.

After he flew into London from New York last week to meet the Queen at the opening ceremony, he told me that architecture has to confound what we take to be reality, in the same way that we have to challenge the apparent inevitability of cancer. “We have a very limited idea of what architecture really is. We think of it as a consumer item, like buying a refrigerator or a car, but architecture is not like that at all.”