Architecture News Plus (ANP) – Architecture and Design Magazine

Hospice Djursland

This is a project by C. F. Møller Architects and it is located at Djursland, Rønde, Denmark. There are twelve images for Hospice Djursland.

: © Adam Mørk

Project images

Designer's statement

The Hospice Djursland is a palliative treatment facility with room for 15 patients, located in a beautiful landscape setting overlooking the bay of Aarhus.

In hospice design, the architect's finest task is to create surroundings which will provide the best possible conditions to promote quality of life, respect and a dignified death.

Djursland Hospice is first and foremost a building within a landscape. No matter where you go in the building - the reception area, the garden of the senses, the atriums, the staff room, the lounge, the reflection room or the patient rooms - the beautiful landscape is always present.

We have aimed to create a very humane building; by which we mean a building which is not an institution, but rather a home which provides adequate physical and mental space for those who will live there in their final time, as well as for their relatives and the staff.

The semi-circular layout is to ensure that all patient-rooms enjoy an equally privileged view over the bay, and that they are located within a more private zone in the building, set back from the common rooms. Each room has a private terrace overlooking the landscape, and the section of the roof draws daylight deep into the rooms, providing a skylight over the sleeping area and the bathroom, and a soft curve to the ceiling.

The common materials used throughout are copper, oak and glass, which interact beautifully and naturally with the landscape and provide a sense of warmth in the rooms.

The landscape branch of C. F. Møller Architects has designed the landscape and gardens surrounding the hospice, with special emphasis on the sensory aspects of sight, smell, touch and sound, as well as the overall accessibility for patients, even those confined to beds, resulting in a series of soft, rounded shapes and niches joined by green rubber-bitumen surfaces.