Danish dignity: the chapel may have been displaced from being the centre of the hospital (p40), but it can play its part in healing.

The Lutherans (particularly the Scandinavian kind) have produced many of the most moving religious buildings of the last 100 years. Quiet manipulation of cool light, precise understanding of calm space, sensitivity to landscape are some of the qualities that have informed the best churches and chapels of the north since Asplund and Lewerentz. There Is also a profound understanding of death, of the need for rites of passage and of dignifying relationships between the living and the dead. The chapel by Friis & Moltke at Aalborg South Hospital is very firmly in this tradition. At first (and to most people) the building seems very simple indeed. A precise white rectangle is relieved only by a double-height cube, a few slots and the main entrance - a generous wide portico which leads you past a court, mostly devoted to a sky-reflecting pool, towards the welcoming wooden door. By this time, you have come through a simple route over the grey granite setts of the car park, along a perfectly cast in-situ concrete wall , among a grove of young oaks, which at the moment are tall, thin and elegant -- gradually, they will become more generous as their canopies grow to shelter grieving visitors.

Once inside the building, visitors are deflected left towards the chapel anteroom, attracted by a glazed lightwell. Another left turn brings you into the chapel itself, a tall and noble white volume. It is made luminous by slots in the ceiling, and by a long thin court on the south side which contains a golden wave-like sculpture by Erik Heide. A thin window high up in the east wall, which has a painting by Stig Brogger, does not dazzle like, for instance, the Romanesque slit in the apse of Torcello, but serves to remind of the forces of nature.

That odd experience of coming into the chapel and seeing the Heide wave under the light of the sky is one intimation that the building is very much more complicated and subtle than it seems at first sight. In fact, the clean prismatic perimeter contains an unexpected series of spaces, and is but the upper part of a highly technical building which is mostly underground, linked to the main hospital by a tunnel that connects to the subterranean layer that underlies most such buildings.

On the lower floor are the autopsy rooms, the cooled corpse store, the forensic dissection chamber and staff and training quarters. A ramp that is entered through gates on the south side of the upper floor leads down to a generous underground manoeuvring area for hearses. All this mechanical and (for most of us) rather sinister area is made bearable by a light court punched down next to the pool that greets visitors at the main entrance. Along the side of the pool, a slatted screen allows some sunlight to get down to the lower level, but prevents you looking down into the autopsy rooms (or even being aware of them). A lift carries coffins from the lower floor to the ceremonial one.

Throughout, construction is as simple and unobtrusive as possible. Structural elements are in-situ and precast concrete, rendered white above ground. In the ceremonial parts, floors are of granite; elsewhere, they are finished in linoleum, that excellent and often under-appreciated material which is used throughout the main hospital.

In Denmark, architects can still aspire to the Gesamtkunstwerk, because in one of the richest countries in the world, there is astonishingly still an industry in which craftsmanship can be an essential element, as it was in Jacobsen's day. Friis & Moltke have a product design department which was responsible for all the furniture and light fittings on the ceremonial floor. Their unfussy, thoughtful, solid details add to the calm and reassurance of the place.