Birth Place Lab is hosting its Justice and Equity in Perinatal Services (JEPS) Hub seminar, “Material and Spirit: Designing Birth Spaces with Head, Heart and Hands,” with Anka Dür and Dr. Esben Bala Skouboe on April 30th at 11 AM PST/2 PM EST.
Interested attendees can register here: qr.link/37OnMC
About the Seminar
This seminar will be split into two parts:
Architect Esben Bala Skouboe, PhD, from Studio Poesis, will deliver an inspiring talk on Transforming Birth through Architecture and Design, emphasizing the critical role of design and art in humanizing birth environments. Drawing from his own practice and research from Denmark, Dr. Skouboe will share diverse case studies, innovative methodologies, and design exemplars, showcasing how immersive and responsive architecture can enhance birth experiences and outcomes. The presentation highlights the power of transdisciplinary collaboration and creative thinking in reshaping healthcare spaces and practice. With poetic clarity, he invites attendees to envision a paradigm shift, where architecture harmonizes with human needs to foster sensorial and existential qualities, empowering spaces for one of life's most profound moments - birth.
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Architect and Midwife Anka Dür's seminar explores the role of the built environment in shaping childbirth as a complex neuropsychosocial process. Moving beyond a purely clinical understanding, it investigates how space, architecture, and institutional structures influence physiology, perception, and decision-making during labour. Drawing on diverse birthing cultures, including Indigenous perspectives, it presents a relational framework connecting architecture, birth, and context, showing how these elements shape birthing environments across cultural and institutional settings.
From a sensory perspective, the seminar examines how light, sound, smell, materiality, and haptic qualities affect the birthing person’s experience and bodily processes. Participants are invited to reconsider the birthing room as an active contributor rather than a neutral backdrop. Emphasis is placed on the use of natural and sustainable materials—such as clay, wood, lime, and sheep’s wool—and on how thoughtful, responsible construction can support both human health and environmental stewardship.
Finally, the seminar introduces a salutogenic approach, positioning architecture and midwifery care as interdependent practices. Through this lens, participants will explore how carefully designed environments can promote autonomy, safety, and well-being, and how collaboration between design and care disciplines can create more supportive and health-promoting birth experiences.
Learning objectives
1. Participants will explore how birth environments influence physiological processes through a biopsychosocial lens, including spatial power dynamics.
2. Participants will analyze the sensory and material dimensions of birthing spaces, and develop an understanding of how architecture and midwifery care can support health, autonomy, and positive birth experiences.
About the Speakers
Esben Bala Skouboe (MSc.Eng.Arch. and Design, PhD), is an award-winning architect, designer, and researcher; his work has been exhibited, among other places, at the Architecture Biennale in Venice. He has experience in curating complex design projects in the healthcare sector and every week more than 100 children are born in his sensorial birth rooms in Denmark. He has a PhD in responsive environments from Aalborg University. Esbens has received +15 grants and his work has been published in international journals, books & conferences related to the domain of Art & Responsive Architectural Innovation. Esben's work has further contributed to art-exhibition in Denmark and he is the author of more than 20 scientific papers. Esben has worked with healthcare design since 2015 and is the recipient of the Parckness Foundation Architecture Prize for his innovative approach to architecture and design.
Anka Dür is an Austrian-born architect and midwife living in Switzerland, whose work investigates the intersection of architecture, materiality, and the physiology of birth. She is actively engaged with The First Room, an international network of experts on birth environments, promoting salutogenic and empowering birth spaces. She studied architecture at ETH Zurich, TU Berlin, and the University of Innsbruck, and in 2016 co-founded the activist collective Birth Culture a–z, advocating for freedom of choice in birth settings, raising awareness around respectful birth, and bringing birth into the center of societal value.
Dür curated the exhibition Birth Culture a–z at the Women’s Museum Hittisau in Austria and has lectured at TU Wien. Her design projects, including Room for Birth and Senses, explore how natural and sustainable materials—earth, wood, lime, and wool—combined with light, sound, and tactile qualities, can shape environments that support the body, regulate the nervous system, and foster presence, autonomy, and self-determination during birth. Her current work focuses on a modular birthing room concept for fast, sustainable, and scalable birth centers.
She previously led a Swiss pilot project developing salutogenic birth pavilions and contributed as a research consultant to the Global Birth Environment Design Network (GBEDN). She collaborates internationally, including with Indigenous midwives in Central America, and was featured in In Your Hands (Dettmar, 2023), highlighting her work at the forefront of innovative, holistic, and women-centered birth design.
If you have missed any recent seminars, you can access all of the recordings on the seminar series page.
Thank you, we look forward to seeing you there.