Cluster for Architecture and Health

The research cluster for Architecture and Health explores how the physical environment impacts human health. 

Designing our physical surroundings, so that they facilitate healthy behaviors, can reduce the burden of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and Diabetes. But the design of buildings, cities and landscapes can also impact the spread of major infectious diseases like Malaria and Dengue fever. As we have recently witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the built environment plays an important role in our strategies to contain the spread of viral diseases. This knowledge is not new. But the pressing circumstances have brought renewed attention to the potential of the built environment as a means to promote human health and wellbeing, and as a means to control the transmission of diseases in society. After all, a virus never travels alone, but is always tied to humans, shared spaces and transmission techniques that are necessary to activate it and keep it in existence.

At the same time, the architectural design of contemporary hospitals is increasingly required to respond to values like comfort and environments that sup­port healing, thus expanding the scope of ‘cure’ from a medical to a spatial and even an aesthetic concern. 

Our aim is to establish and engage in cross-disciplinary collaborations, within and outside the Royal Danish Academy, to explore, investigate and create new knowledge and solutions in the intersection between architecture and health; knowledge and solutions, which have the disciplines of architecture, urbanism and landscape design in a central position.