Master Lecture Series - Can Architecture Affect your Health?
Master Lecture Series - Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre - Jockey Club Emotional & Psychosocial Support Programme: Can Architecture Affect Your Health?
Speaker: Lily Jencks
At least 60% of you will die in a hospital. And before you do, you will spend hundreds of hours in a hospital either for yourself or visiting friends and family. Our daily lives are becoming more medicalized, and as we live for longer, with more complex chronic medical conditions, visiting healthcare providers will become a daily part of life. Hospitals are places where we experience fundamental aspects of existence: birth, death, vulnerability, pain. Yet most architects will never be part of the conversation of designing hospitals. Must the architecture of our hospitals be so alienating?
Looking at the architecture and psychology of Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres (the Maggie’s Centre Tuen Mun was designed by Frank Gehry with a landscape by Lily Jencks), this talk will investigate the power of architecture to affect our health. Beyond the realm of health care facilities, this has contributions to make in terms of understanding the power of architecture in all design facets.
We should no longer accept that hospital architecture is too complicated to be part of a general debate about architectural values and its functions. If we succeed in breaking open the hermetically closed world of hospital architecture, it may be possible to reconceptualise the hospital and the city, and consider how to create a City of Care.
Lily Jencks is an architect and landscape architect based in London. She is Unit Master of Diploma 13 at the Architects Association, which is redesigning London as a City of Care. She sits on the board of Maggie’s Centres, and has been involved in designing 2 Maggie’s Centres: in Hong Kong with Frank Gehry Associates, and in Glasgow, Scotland with OMA.
For enquiries and RSVP, please contact Mr. Yau at evance@vtc.edu.hk / 39282839.
Date: 14 April 2016
Time: 2pm – 3:30pm
Venue: C002, HKDI
Language: English (simultaneous interpretation not provided)