Revisit Roosenberg Abbey

摘要

The Dutch Benedictine monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan (1904-1991) has a rather limited oeuvre. He did not have his own architecture office, but worked from his personal abbey cell, always in collaboration with his brother, architect Nico van der Laan. And although as a teacher he advised his students on all kinds of projects, his own main achievements can be summarised in four convents and a house. His modest output can be explained through Dom van der Laan's position amid Dutch postwar Modernism. His teachings on architectural fundamentals and proportional systems, as well as the realisations that sprang from them, were condemned as being too traditional. Nobody read his 1960 book Le Nombre Plastique, although revised by Gerrit Rietveld as the most complete and scientific system that approaches the knowledge of the laws of discernment in relation to proportions.