Dr Daria Ricchi

This book provides designers and students with the first in-depth analysis of the architecture of the world-renowned Maggie's Cancer Care Centres, conceived by Maggie Keswick Jencks, a terminally ill cancer patient, and her husband Charles Jencks, landscape designer and architectural critic. The book explores the interactions between architecture and social activity in the centres and examines how and why they are so successful -- addressing themes from the brief (Maggie Jencks' 'Blueprint'), to the manipulation of sensory and atmospheric qualities, to how the surrounding environment provides occupants with a sense of refuge and comfort. The book also includes a comparative review of all 28 Maggie's Centres, designed by a select list of celebrated architects (including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, and Snohetta) and features over 60 pages of building information - an invaluable reference source for designers alongside the main thematic discussion.

The success of the Maggie's Centres has important global implications for the improvement of the design of care structures and therapeutic environments. The centres have established a flexible design methodology capable of uplifting the quality of life of the people involved. By helping to understand and identify these parameters, this book will provide important insights for all students, scholars, and professionals involved in healthcare architecture, architecture for social care, as well as all those interested in the broad impact of architectural environments on people. -- Provided by publisher.

Writing Architecture in Modern Italy tells the history of an intellectual group connected to the small but influential Italian Einaudi publishing house between the 1930s and the 1950s. It concentrates on a diverse group of individuals, including Bruno Zevi, an architectural historian and politician; Giulio Carlo Argan, an art historian; Italo Calvino, a fiction writer; Giulio Einaudi, a publisher; and Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, both writers and translators.

Linking architectural history and historiography within a broader history of ideas, this book proposes four different methods of writing history, defining historiographical genres, modes, and tones of writing that can be applied to history writing to analyze political and social moments in time. It identifies four writing genres: myths, chronicles, history, and fiction, which became accepted as forms of multiple postmodern historical stories after 1957.

An important contribution to the architectural debate, Writing Architecture in Modern Italy will appeal to those interested in the history of architecture, history of ideas, and architectural education.