Maggie’s Leeds is a Good Architecture and Uplifting Landscape

Maggie’s is a charity founded by garden designer Maggie and her husband, architecture critic Charles Jencks to create cancer care centres where people could access emotional and psychological support surrounded by good architecture and uplifting landscape. 

The lighting aims to create kinder spaces, as well as being emphatic with the architecture, plants, art and materials. Warm lighting is placed in niches which hold plants, pictures, books and other household things. Elsewhere, simple uplights illuminate the soffits. External lighting is garden-scale and appears unstructured like the planting. Every luminaire serves multiple purposes; simple column-mounted spotlights provide indirect lighting to the high soffits and serve as emergency luminaires.

Night-time transforms the building, making it perfectly legible against the higher hospital buildings. With a fully glazed perimeter, ensuring a seamless transition from the inside out was key. From the inside, the main objective was to avoid specular reflections and maintain clear views out into the garden. Façade lighting was consciously avoided, instead, externally legibility was maintained and soffit overhangs lit by placing sources carefully. Landscape lighting is lowkey: glowing bollards in key locations diffuse light sideways to give visual depth and help understand the irregular and steep surroundings,but disappear within the foliage. Low glare uplights highlight tree specimens, adding vertical references along the terraced landscape.

Project Information

Architect: Light Bureau