CBBarnett
Senior Member
A lot will depend on whether this building attempts to integrate to its surroundings, and I am not talking about height and largess alone. The pictures about lead me to believe there is a very wide set-back from the existing roads - 10 - 30 metres at least. This can be done tastefully, but can also be a disaster (see 1970s corridor planning for examples).
While what is happening inside is more important, that is also someone else's job. Designers, planners and architects must do their job as well too. It's not enough to say "well the intentions of the place are noble so it gets a pass." That is a lazy, sloppy approach that results in lazy, sloppy cities. A cancer centre can be both good at treating people as well as being a well integrated and connected hub of the community. It can be designed to be easy to get to and navigate through without compromising any cancer-fighting objective or cost target.
The very wide set-backs make me wary for this reason. Essentially we set aside this giant buffer for what might be a nice garden, however is more likely to be a windswept, dark pedestrian time-waster as they are forced to navigate from the intersection to the front entrance facing inward into the site. If done as poorly as Foothills and other provincial institutions have been designed in the past, all this does is propagate what we are great at: turning high density activity and job areas into unaccessible, car-oriented wastelands. Surely we can treat cancer and design a building that is accessible to everyone at the same time and a net positive to the surrounding community. We haven't done this yet at really any of our institutions built in the last 40 years, but perhaps the Cancer Centre could be different.
