The Therapeutic Power of the Maggie's Centre

Join us for the launch of The Therapeutic Power of the Maggie's Centre

Experience, Design and Wellbeing, Where Architecture Meets Neuroscience.

This book is about the therapeutic environment of the Maggie’s centre and explores the many ways this is achieved. With an unconventional architecture as required by the design brief, combined with Maggie’s 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 Maggie’s centre, the book reveals its fundamentals: Maggie’s Therapeutikos (the-mind-as-important-as-the-body), the Architectural Brief and the ‘Client-Architect-Users’ Triad. It continues by unfolding Maggie’s 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 Maggie’s 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 Maggie’s centre.

The book concludes by critically evaluating the Maggie’s 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.

The event will begin at 6pm with a 15 minute introduction by author Caterina Frisone followed by guest speakers; Dame Laura Lee, Maggie's CEO, Ivan Harbor (RSHP) architect of Maggie's West London, Lesley Howells, Maggies Lead Psychologist and Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Piers Gough (CZWG), architect of Maggie's Nottingham and Professor Cathrine Brun, Oxford Brookes University to celebrate the launch of this new publication.

Caterina Frisone, architect and former Interior Architecture professor at the Oxford Brookes University, is the founder and currently director of the Master in Architecture and Health, at the University Iuav of Venice, born after a five-year experience (2017-2022) in the world of English healthcare. By exploring this theme and investigating the interdisciplinarity between architecture and neuroscience, her book The Therapeutic Power of Maggie's Centre aims to inspire architects, doctors, students and all those who research the relationship between architecture and health.

The book will be sold at the special price of £30 (RRP £36.99)