By Caterina Frisone

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.