Modern architecture was born out of a tempest of socio-cultural instabilities. The myriad of styles of revival architecture in the 19th century, combined with technological progress and aesthetic revolution, presented architectural theories with a crisis. This crisis is intensified by the destruction of Europe in WWI; an intensification which is double-down with the foreseeable sequel war. Architectural institutions were at a loss to produce students of the quality required to rebuild Europe and reshape western identity. A number of schools, including the lauded Bauhaus, instituted programs for perceptual training. If architects were a vision worthy of the task could not be found, perhaps they could be created.
During this storm, Hans Van der Laan left his architectural studies after growing irreconcilably critical of the pedagogical method and content in the program. In his view, the program lacked any fundamental theory for what architecture is and how its essence was to be brought to material expression. The following year, van der Laan entered the Benedictine holy order and took up residence at the Abbey of St. Paul at Oosterhout in pursuit of the monastic life.
By inhabiting the rhythms of the Benedictine order, Van der Laan devoted his life to developing a theory of proportion guided by making the right approximations between spaces, material forms, and ideas, and not one grounded in an overly determinative mathematical formula. His buildings strived to bring a calming balance to the architectural innovations of the time. Architecture, in his view, was a haptic means to train perception in general. Through moving through his buildings, vision is adjusted to see all reality as a spatial symbol that points to God's ubiquity.
This paper will present Van der Laan's theory of architectonic proportion as a contrast to his contemporaries, emphasizing the influence of the Benedictine Order for his insights and prescriptions.