Hundreds of people pass through the atrium of University College Hospital every day, and from this week they are walking through a house that is not quite a house. Large timber-framed structures, draped with cyanotype images printed on fabric, fill the space as part of a new public artwork by multimedia artist Lynn Dennison called Home Truths, which opened on 28 October and remains on view until 24 November.

The work takes its shape from Passivhaus design, the low-energy approach to building developed by architects including Mikhail Riches, Mae and Peter Barber, whose ideas inform the installation. But its subject is not architecture for its own sake. Drawing on research from University College London into the effects of homelessness and inadequate housing on population health, the piece asks visitors to consider how damp, cold, overcrowded or temporary homes contribute to infection, poor mental health, accidents and shorter lives, and how decent housing benefits the whole community rather than only the people who live in it.

Dennison developed the commission alongside families who have lived in temporary accommodation, as well as doctors, paediatricians, council housing teams, architects and planners. A film shown with the installation follows the same theme, setting out the case for affordable, sustainable homes. The project sits within Healthy Homes for All, a cross-disciplinary programme led by researchers from the Bartlett School of Architecture and UCL's Department of Primary Care and Population Health, and forms part of the university's bicentennial programme.

Those behind the project say they chose a hospital deliberately. The hospital's arts curator argues that art in healthcare settings should do more than soothe, and that this work is meant to challenge as well as engage. The programme's co-directors make the same point in blunter terms: the shortage of well-designed affordable housing is not only an architectural problem but a public health one, and putting that argument in front of patients, staff and visitors is the point of the commission.