The Harold Alfond Center for Cancer Care is the most beautiful building you never want to visit.

On the other hand, if you or anyone you love has cancer, it's precisely the place you want to be.

Open to patients for the first time tomorrow, the center is the architectural embodiment of kindness, grace and the desire to heal. In its earth-toned walls, its uncountable windows, its high ceilings, gracious gardens and soft, soft lighting, the center welcomes those who are ill and says to them through its very design: We are here to make you whole.

It is too easy these days to talk about caring. We have cheapened the words that describe love by throwing them around profligately. So it is difficult to make them stick when we really mean them.

Yet you would have to have a hard heart indeed not to feel the love that went into the the center's construction. Administrators from MaineGeneral, which operates the center, shake their heads in amazement when they speak of the dedication of those whose efforts built the center, from high-level engineers and architects to the laborers who laid stone and tile. Perhaps that is because almost all of us know and love someone who has cancer -- and building the center was a concrete way to do something for them.

There are many innovative ways in which the center cares for its patients. There are multi-million dollar state-of-the-art machines that offer the latest technology for treating cancer.

But technology cannot alone heal a person. A set of principles guided the center's design, and they include respect for patient choices (chemotherapy inside or outside? in a group or alone?); a layout designed to allow patients to get all their treatment in one building rather than bouncing around from specialist to specialist; provision for family members and friends to accompany patients during all aspects of their consultation and treatment; individual access to useful health information as well as diverting entertainment (wireless laptops, anyone?); the provision of spiritual support, nutritional advice, rehabilitation services and non-traditional therapies such as acupuncture and herbal treatment.

Combine those principles with the technology and what do you get? A linear accelerator that delivers radiation therapy in a room where the ceiling is illuminated with fiber optics that, when the lights are turned down during a treatment session, look to a patient like a constellation of stars.

In addition, the building respects the environment as much as its occupants. That's appropriate in a building dedicated to healing. The first Green Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, silver-level-certified health care facility in the state, there are uncountable conservation measures built into its design. One notable example of how the building takes a potential environmental problem and answers it with cleverness and aesthetic triumph is the pond and fountain featured in front of the center. That's where the site's runoff is directed, collected and sent by jets into the air, a maneuver that both mitigates the harmful effects of paving the bare ground and oxygenates the water, keeping it clear and lively.

While just within the Augusta boundaries, the center is located nearly perfectly in the center of MaineGeneral's service area, just off the highway. No patient or family member will find it anything but accessible, literally and figuratively.

Many individuals and businesses contributed to the building's $42 million cost. Each and every single one of them should be proud of what they've helped accomplish. They have not only given an immense gift to cancer patients and families in this region, they have given a gift to all of us. There is nothing like the Harold Alfond Center for Cancer Care in the state of Maine, and perhaps nothing like it in the entire Northeast. It will be a source of pride for generations.