Hans van der Laan

Dom Hans van der Laan (29 December 1904 – 19 August 1991) was a Dutch Benedictine monk and architect.

Granpré Molière regarded his Catholic faith as inseparably bound up with architecture, a concept with which Van der Laan could not agree.

After World War II Van der Laan, with his brother Nico, led a course in Church Architecture in the Kruithuis in 's-Hertogenbosch, using the early Christian basilica as an example, for training architects for the post-war reconstruction of Catholic churches and monasteries, and also of secular buildings.

From these courses arose the Bossche School, a name given by opponents of the Van der Laan brothers and their followers.

To illustrate his ideas about relationships he made use of two teaching aids developed by himself: the architectural abacus and the morphotheque, for two- and three-dimensional forms respectively.Why we build houses "Since the ground is too hard for our bare feet, we make sandals: for the sole of the sandal we use a material softer than the floor but harder than our feet.

Successfully achieving that meeting between the two is no more simply a matter for the small piece of softened ground that we wear on our feet, but a 'piece of habitable space', which we can separate from the natural environment with walls.

The last work to be executed from his designs was the monastery of the Benedictine nuns of Tomelilla in southern Sweden (largely finished in 1995).