Continuatio naturae

The monastic architecture of Dom Hans van der Laan

Abstract

In an autobiographical text written towards the end of his life, Hans van der Laan pointed out, remembering his childhood and adolescence years, that the main objective in those crucial years for his training had been the knowledge of nature: «Slow but surely, "he writes," I entered into the life of nature, being aware that it had been created by God. My older sister, who died during the war, had as a teacher, both in elementary school and in high school, a nun who, according to the school's way, accompanied her students from the first to the last class. This Sister Josefa always told them in class the biblical story of Creation, which applied to everything. My sister told it to the little brother -that is to say, to me-, and I verified it in the field, during my solitary walks ».

Certainly, the successive stages of his youth formation were marked, as he himself testifies in that text, by other objectives: the university years for the knowledge of society, the beginning of the monastic life for the knowledge of the liturgy. However, this interest in discovering the order that underlies nature, not only would not disappear, but with the passage of time would intensify and deepen. In fact, all its architecture was marked by the desire to prolong and complete that order, since it always conceived the architectural space as the place that allows man to establish a harmonious relationship with the natural environment. To achieve this, Van der Laan would use the 'plastic number', which was designed as the instrument capable of introducing, in the artificial world created by man, the characteristic intelligibility of Creation as a divine work.