THE SPACE REQUIRED TO CARE: AND THE TOXIC BUILT ENVIRONMENT
NO.12
MAE MURPHY & RUN LIN
DATUM
12
Our process of understanding care began by analyzing spaces through the exploration of Maggie’s Centers providing emotional and social support care to cancer patients in a structure built just outside of major hospitals. The Maggie’s Centers have become quite trendy for well-known architects to design around the world. For example, Zaha Hadid’s center in the Fife Victoria Hospital, Richard Murphy’s center at the Edinburgh Western General Hospital and Frank Gehry’s in the Dundee Ninewells Hospital. Mapping the care spaces is important to understand where these acts of care occur. Yet it can be even more intrinsically important to locate the spaces causing harm-- a factor against care practices. Often the most abundant and affordable building materials such as plastics, metals, and wood are very toxic. What can we use that is better for the environment, cost effective, easily constructed and ethically aware? Every day, buildings are designed to take CARE of people but they are built upon the very materials that cause harm. Carcinogenic building materials are present within almost every space created in the 20th and 21st century. Cancer is caused when two cells divide during mitosis incorrectly due to a mutation. They miscommunicate, replicate uncontrollably, obtain too many messages and/or divide incorrectly. Whatever the case, these bad cells begin to build up without the preventative checks in balances in place. This process is internal. The cell comes from within and outwardly destroy us. 20th century building materials --along with pretty much every manufactured item within consumerism today-- cause forms of cancer such as lung, stomach, pancreatic, bladder, kidney, skin, prostate, nasal passage, breast, testicular, and many more. The very walls we build to shelter ourselves are the ones harming us.
“The very walls we build to shelter ourselves are the ones harming us. This toxic relationship with our beloved materials causes the most harm.” This toxic relationship with our beloved materials causes the most harm. So why don’t we have more PREVENTATIVE measures instead of post diagnosis in terms of cancer treatment? The very research that goes into curing cancer is the
