The brief from the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust was a visionary one, inviting a ground breaking and innovative design to achieve a step change in the care of cancer patients.

Our proposal places equal emphasis on care and treatment. We use form, landscape and the quality of light to communicate the concept of care, creating a kind and purposeful environment which is self- evidently at the patient’s disposal.

We also ensure that the building is well planned to provide an excellent working environment and support delivery of the latest technologies and therapies.

This building - to which many patients will return repeatedly during their course of treatment - offers a calm, ordered sequence of spaces which may not reveal itself fully at a first visit, but which is immediately understandable.

An almost constant relationship is maintained between interior and external spaces and landscape. Greeting, socialising, waiting, eating and treatment are all accommodated in spaces which are animated by daylight, sun and shadow and provide distraction by the penetration of landscape deep into the building’s plan.

We have placed the main circulation spaces on the outside of the building as two glazed galleries which are shaded from sunlight and brought to life by being placed almost within the mature and dense woodland which is on two of the three sites we have identified.