Architectural practice: Heatherwick Studio 

Project name/title: Maggie’s Yorkshire

Client name: Maggie’s Trading Ltd.

Location: Leeds, United Kingdom

Completion year: 2020

Maggie’s, a charity that provides support for people living with cancer, commissioned Heatherwick Studio to create its new centre on the campus of St James’s University Hospital in Leeds. It needed to be a welcoming place for visitors and to include a library, counselling rooms and informal seating areas. 

Set in the midst of medical buildings, the site was one of the few green spaces left on the campus. This was preserved and accentuated by creating the structure out of the garden itself, raising up the planted surface. The centre is expressed as a grouping of large-scale planters of varying sizes. The base of each planter encloses a distinct private place for visitors to meet or spend time by themselves. The spaces between offer relaxed and approachable social spaces for group conversation and activities with the biomorphic interior architecture offering a respite from the clinical environment of the hospital.