The Therapeutic Power of the Maggies Centre: Experience, Design and Wellbeing, Where Architecture meets Neuroscience

This book is about the therapeutic environment of the Maggies centre and explores the many ways this is achieved. With an unconventional architecture as required by the design brief, combined with Maggies psychological support programme, this special health facility allows extraordinary therapeutic effects in people, to the point that one can speak of therapeutic power.

After tracing the story of the Maggies centre, the book reveals its fundamentals: Maggies Therapeutikos (the-mind-as-important-as-the-body), the Architectural Brief and the Client-Architect-Users Triad. It continues by unfolding Maggies synergy-that between people and place-which increases users psychological flexibility helping them tolerate what was intolerable before. Although comfort and atmospheres are paramount, they are not enough to define the therapeutic environment of the Maggies centre. Only by looking at neuroscience that can give us scientific explanations of empathy, feelings and emotions and only considering space neither neutral nor empty, but full of forces that envelop people in an embodied experience, can we explain what generates wellbeing in a Maggies centre.

The book concludes by critically evaluating the Maggies centre as a model to be applied to other healthcare facilities and to architecture in general. It is essential reading for any student or professional working on therapeutic environments.