Dom Hans van der Laan

Archiphoto Haarlem For over thirty years, the Dutch Benedictine monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan taught practical practitioners. His lessons were devoted to a deeper quest: to record the foundations of architecture once and for all. In his book The Architectural Space of 1977, he defines concepts such as inside and outside or mass and space to capture the essence of a building. In addition, he introduces his own ratio system of the plastic number. His theory and method remain quite hermetic and from this book it can not be deduced how the practice of building can connect to this. As he did himself strongly, this resulted in an elementary and pure building style. The link between theory and practice can be made by analyzing Dom van der Laan’s teaching materials: his tools and study examples, and the designs that were made by him and his students.

Jeroen Verrecht

In the lecture, Caroline Voet brings this rich archival material back to life and lets you look inside the learning environment where Dom van der Laan passed on his mastery.