Can architecture provide love and solace? Can it actually be healing? And if so, then what characteristics must it possess? Acclaimed architect Charles Jencks shares his experiences with the cancer caring centres that he devised together with his wife Maggie Keswick, who herself died of cancer in 1995.

Can architecture provide love and solace? Can it actually be healing? And if so, then what characteristics must it possess? Acclaimed architect Charles Jencks shares his experiences with the cancer caring centres that he devised together with his wife Maggie Keswick, who herself died of cancer in 1995.

Can architecture be good for your health? Or to put it another way, can architecture make a diffrence to society, business productivity, profits and to hospitals?
With cancer patients, could it affect the longevity of life, or make aa difference with outcomes?

"Architecture or Revolution?"

Why do architects preach their better world, their utopian projects?
But, you may well ask, how would this Beneficent effect square with the Hawthorne effect?
And, even if it turns out to be true, is it the result of the architecture or the institution; the building or the service we provide?

However crude a statistic, it does beg some questions: how can phoney things work? Or to introduce a legal perplexity: how can we license witch-doctors?
Or, switching the discussion to architecture: how do we gauge the affect of a building on health if, like the placebo effect, it is partly in th emind? To put the question differently, is there an architectural placebo?