Can architecture help in recovery from life-threatening disease? What roles might design play in our complex medical infrastructure? Must healthcare facilities appear so similar, so lacking in character, so removed from nature?

Maggie’s Centres are for anyone affected by cancer. Built on the grounds of hospitals throughout the United Kingdom, they are designed to be welcoming places that provide practical, emotional, and social support to patients and their families. This idea was conceived by the late Maggie Keswick Jencks, along with her husband Charles, as a direct response to her own experience with cancer. Maggie was known in her lifetime as an expert on Chinese gardens; Charles Jencks is a leading architectural historian.

The first Maggie’s Centre opened in 1996 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Today there are 16 Centres across the UK, with more planned. Maggie’s Centres: A Blueprint for Cancer Care presents five Centres: two in Scotland (Dundee and Gartnavel), two in England (West London and Nottingham), and one proposed for St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the heart of London. Each building is designed by an internationally renowned architect together with landscape architects and, in the case of Nottingham, a fashion designer.

Under the leadership of chief executive Laura Lee, Maggie’s former oncology nurse, a team of more than 150 employees are working to create communal spaces that are “everything a hospital isn’t”: Patients can access supplementary services and meet others in environments that are designed to be not simply cozy but also non-hierarchical, beautiful, and stimulating. Maggie’s Centres: A Blueprint for Cancer Care is augmented by photographs of patients by Mary McCartney and furniture that, in the spirit of Maggie’s Centres, viewers are encouraged to use.