Thomas Heatherwick gets the green light...

Thomas Heatherwick is one of our favourite designers. Having created the ingenious Magis Spun Chair, his designs are loved by many, although not many realise the scale on which Thomas Heatherwick sometimes designs. He's known for the sleek new big red London bus but Thomas Heatherwick is emersing himself in bigger, greener, incredible projects including the contraversial Garden Bridge and has just been given the green light for his plant-covered design for a Maggie's cancer-care centre in Yorkshire.

His designs are beautifully ingenious,he said "Instead of taking away the open space, we wanted to make a whole building out of a garden."

The plan is to create a building that looks like a group of giant pot plants in the grounds of St James's University Hospital in Leeds. This building will provide a drop-in centre for anyone suffering from or affected by cancer. 

The fantastically unique design comprises a series of curved structures with plant-covered roofs creating a peaceful, tranquile,positive and beautiful space.

The Heatherwick-designed Maggie's Centre is scheduled to open in 2017. It will offer psychological support, benefits advice, nutrition workshops, relaxation and stress management, art therapy, tai chi and yoga. IIt is the perfect environment to fascilitate all of this, adding to the relaxation element. 

"Creating a calm and uplifting environment to enable us to be able to provide our programme of support to people living with cancer is incredibly important and Heatherwick Studio's wonderful design will allow us to do just that," summed up perfectly by Maggie's chief executive Laura Lee.