A House to Live With: 16 Variations by Dom Hans van der Laan and His Companions

Examines sixteen residential buildings designed by Dom Hans van der Laan and his students for the first time.

Today, Dom Hans van der Laan (1904–91) is something of a cult figure of European post-World War II architecture. The Dutch Benedictine monk and architect dedicated his life to the search for fundamental principles of architecture, and his thoughts on numerical relationships and dimensional systems were highly influential in mid-twentieth-century architectural theory.

A House to Live With is the first book to comprehensively explore the residential buildings designed by Van der Laan and some of his students in the Ecclesiastical Architecture course in s-Hertogenbosch, which he directed between 1946 and 1973. Sixteen of them, built between 1966 and 1985, are featured in full detail through photographs and plans newly produced for this book, and analyzed with regard to their compositional and design principles. Essays examine the mathematical relationships of numbers and volumes that are fundamental to van der Laan’s designs, alongside a discussion of how he was influenced by ancient Roman architecture. Light is shed also on the interplay of house and garden and house and patio, and the positioning of the one large table in the house, which to van der Laan was of key significance.

Thoroughly researched and highly readable, this volume introduces Hans van der Laan’s architectural ideas and housing designs in full, thus forming a rich and useful source for contemporary architects.

Hans W. van der Laan is a Dutch architect and a nephew of Dom Hans van der Laan, with whom he worked closely on some of the projects documented in the book.