If you have ever found yourself questioning the frivolities of modern architecture, the Maggies Cancer Caring Centre designed by Japanese Architect Kisho Kurokawa will put these doubts to rest.
Kisho Kurokawa (1934-2007) was one of the founding fathers of the Metabolic Movement in the late 1950's. The Metabloic Movement, born partly out of necessity following housing issues in Japan after World war II, spawned a practical avant-garde style of architectural design that has echoed through out the 20th Century and into the 21st.
In 2007, shortly before his death, Kurokawa gifted the design of the Maggies Cancer Caring Centre in Swansea as a token of his freindship with Maggie Keswick-Jencks. On the commissioning board, as a co-founder of Maggie's charity, sits Charles Jencks (architectural landscape designer) who's work itself rings with influences of the Metabolists. The centre is a place for cancer patients to escape the ins and outs of the disease and it treatments in a place for counselling and relaxation. The only work Kurokawa carried out on the project was sketch outline of the centre situated in the grounds of the Singleton Hospital.
Kurokawa's original sketch
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Following Kurokawas death Garber and James Architects picked up the mantle of completing the design for the building, no doubt a daunting task being over-shadowed by such a legacy. Right from Kurokawa's sketch the building offers relief from the 1970's buildings in its vicinity. The two wings of the centre work to obscure views over to the hospital, helping visitors to forget, for a moment, their chronic affliction. After seeing the sketch Garber and James now needed to translate the design into practical geometry and a place that fitted into Maggie's ethos. The building unwraps from a large central space that houses facilities for relaxation or exercise at ground floor, with large amounts of natural daylight flooding through from the circular roof light and strategically placed glass screens. At first floor the sloping wings of the building house smaller auxiliary rooms for more privacy for patients to be alone or to give the opportunity for one on one counselling. This type of space arrangement is reminiscent of traditional Japanese Minka houses, these houses often included
a large space in the middle for cooking and communal family
activities with the sloping roof providing smaller private spaces for
washing or bedrooms.
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The external appearance of the building stays true to the Metabolist's concrete aesthetic, constructed from pre-cast concrete panels that had to be precisely constructed off site, unintentionally are as complex and accurate as the geometric design itself. The surface of the concrete is dotted with triangular cast-in shapes similar to that of a drawing convention hatch for concrete. The sloping curved roof is constructed from a twisted steel ridge beam creating a spine in which to construct the rest of the roof. Hanging from the spine are windows that, along with the roof, tapper into nothing. The external landscaping offers a translation of a minimalistic Japanese Zen Garden furthering to the relaxing connotations.
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