Copenhagen Centre for Cancer and Health

There can be no greater reason for architecture to be designed especially for its users, than in a centre where people recover, rehabilitate or find support in grief from the effects of cancer.

Sitting in a leafy reach of De Gamles By park, the Copenhagen Centre for Cancer and Health neither looks nor smells like a hospital, and is designed on a human scale as an example of healing architecture.

The centre is an anomaly in its Nørrebro neighbourhood of red brick residential blocks – both for its light-refracting aluminium façades, and as a cluster of individual houses connected by a sculptural roof.

Grouped as a welcoming whole, they total 1,885m² and house a café, gym and rooms where the Danish Cancer Society hosts activities, patient groups and psychologist sessions. There is also a kitchen in which to learn about nutrition as vital to healing.

At the centre of this is a monastery-style inner courtyard clad in warm wood. It's a private sanctuary where patients, relatives and those in recovery can grow vegetables, exercise or spend time contemplating in the sun. In both this and the building as a whole, the architects have thought deeply about those who will occupy its spaces – young and old, in remission or extremely sick – to make it a comfortable, comforting place to visit and to stay.