Architectural Education Through Materiality

Pedagogies of 20th Century Design

Elke Couchez, Rajesh Heynickx, Elke Couchez, Rajesh Heynickx

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000473711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

What kind of architectural knowledge was cultivated through drawings, models, design-build experimental houses and learning environments in the 20th century? And, did new teaching techniques and tools foster pedagogical, institutional and even cultural renewal? Architectural Education Through Materiality: Pedagogies of 20th Century Design brings together a collection of illustrated essays dedicated to exploring the complex processes that transformed architecture's pedagogies in the 20th century.

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in interest in the history of architectural education. This book widens the geographical scope beyond local school histories and sets out to discover the very distinct materialities and technologies of schooling as active agents in the making of architectural schools. Architectural Education Through Materiality argues that knowledge transmission cannot be reduced to 'software', the relatively easily detectable ideas in course notes and handbooks, but also has to be studied in close relation to the 'hardware' of, for instance, wall pictures, textiles, campus designs, slide projectors and even bodies.

Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects, educators and theorists including Dalibor Vesely, Dom Hans van der Laan, the Global Tools group, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alfons Hoppenbrouwers, Joseph Rykwert, Pancho Guedes and Robert Cummings, and focusing on student-led educational initiatives in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, the book will inspire students, educators and professionals with an interest in the many ways architectural knowledge is produced and taught.

Part I Objects on display learning through looking

1 From wooden blocks to Scottish Tartans Dom Hans van der Laan’s reconciliation of rational patterns and spatial experience

Caroline Voet

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201205-3

On 23 November 1968, the Dutch architect and Benedictine monk, Dom Hans van der Laan (1904–1991), explained to his students that they had to ‘purify their immediate visual environment by surrounding themselves with good examples’, when designing (VDL L10 1968: 12–25) (Figure 1.1). He then unfolded an 18th-century piece of fabric: the Douglas Tartan, as a tool with which to explain the mechanisms of architecture and urbanism. This traditional Scottish woollen cloth, with white, black, and grey horizontal and vertical strips, was chosen as it embodied the specific architectural phenomenon of a three-dimensional spatial disposition. By the 1960s, Van der Laan was a well-known figure within Catholic architectural circles, using his Benedictine background as a foundation on which to develop philosophical concepts of architectonic space, combining these with a design methodology and a proportional system, as well as an austere and elementary architecture (Padovan 1994, Voet 2012, 2017, 2018).¹ Although Tartan patterns were a common design tool in the structuralist methodology of that time, Van der Laan went further by analysing the textile qualities of the fabric itself, as a means of experimenting with different spatial concepts. Moreover, as a Benedictine monk with a traditional neo-Thomist or neo-scholastic background living in a rapidly changing world, he mobilised the Tartan as a tool with which to integrate his rational ordering principles with a modern conception of space, one undergirded by sensitivity and empathy.

FIGURE 1.1 Dom van der Laan giving a lecture. Photograph: Dom Xavier Botte, approx. 1965 (VDLA).

In what follows, I will develop a reading of the Scottish Tartan by analysing why it was introduced and how it was used as a pedagogical tool. It will be argued that by tracing Van der Laan’s words in the classroom, via a broad series of sources such as letters, lecture notes, and publications, the role of the Scottish Tartan as a conveyer of an abstract architectural syntax of the city on the one hand, while enabling the incorporation of experience and dwelling on the other, can be illuminated.

The course in church architecture

Though an architectural approach through fabrics, clothing and sewing patterns might seem peculiar, for Van der Laan, it formed a natural progression from his work in the monastery’s vestment workshop. After abandoning his architectural studies in Delft in 1927 to become a Benedictine monk, his initial role at the Abbey of Oosterhout was to produce large quantities of garments. The Benedictine environment of ‘ora et labora’ (contemplation and work) formed a fertile ground for an approach of study and contemplation in relation to the development of craftsmanship. Van der Laan designed and made several vestments that are still used today in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. Even at the time, he rationalised this process of making, by unravelling the origins of clothing through the analysis of traditional Greek garments, redrawing them according to strict proportions. From 1948 onwards, he published his findings in the Benedictine journals L’ Artisan et les Arts Liturgiques and L’Ouvrier Liturgique (1948–1953) (Voet, 2009).² Van der Laan gave technical descriptions and guidelines for the application of the correct method for the fabrication of the main liturgical garments such as the alb, the chasuble, the surplice, and the tunic, all following the Façon Classique. The pattern designs testify a rationalist approach towards the establishment of autonomous formal principles. In search of the original concept of Thomas Aquinas’ concept of ‘habitus’, Van der Laan aimed to define a timeless primitiveness and austerity. ‘Habitus’ – or habit – translates as ‘to wear’, but also ‘to have’. Both relate to ‘being’. As Van der Laan observed, ‘We are as we are dressed’ (VDL L5 1950: 2). It is from this perspective that Van der Laan’s architectural theories grew, taking ‘habitus’ as the central analogy of the elemental house. As such, the house as a work of art became itself a source of knowledge (Padovan 1999: 36).

As he had been studying original Greek garments to define general principles, Van der Laan studied Old Syrian basilicas, trying to decode their spatial hierarchy and proportion. His quest to return to the origins of religious architecture was fuelled by an ontology of being, rooted in his neo-Thomist background, which promulgated the belief that formal principles can be grasped by an objective rational ordering principle. Van der Laan regarded the knowing and applying of these universal principles as the general task of the designer, and it defined the architect’s craftsmanship. He forcefully opposed the more subjective, phenomenological approach and embraced the Nouvelle théologie (French for “new theology”), a school of thought in Catholic theology that arose in the mid-20th century, most notably among certain circles of French and German theologians. The shared objective of these theologians was a fundamental reform of the dominance of Catholic neo-scholastic theology, by replacing an ontology of being with an ontology of becoming, one firmly grounded in experiential feelings (Heynickx 2018).³ When he started teaching in 1946, Van der Laan told his students that they had to use ‘the demands of our ratio when realizing architectural form’, as the only means to bring forward ‘an objective aspect of a form’. In other words: he remained with his ontology of being, and the rational, deductive path of thinking it was undergirded by. By using one’s rational mind, all things coming from God (‘exitus’) and, in different ways, returning to him (‘reditus’) could be understood. Nature, as God’s creation, remained a mystery and could only be grasped from an architecture that renders suitable for dwelling through its order. This is far removed from a reality that resulted from, or was based on, a mixture of feelings or impressions and therefore caught up in a process of becoming. Above all, Van der Laan’s thinking was that of a designing architect, combining rationality with a longing to create order. The built form as such was decipherable and makeable via men’s rational capacity (VDL L3 1946: 2).

A quest for rational forms was the driving force behind all of Van der Laan’s lectures at Breda and ‘s Hertogenbosch, where he taught a three-year course on religious architecture in the light of the resurrection of the many destroyed churches.⁴ His topics were not the history of religious architecture and liturgy, but the unfolding of a theory of the reading and ordering of space. He would teach several generations of architects until the course stopped in 1973. His lectures, as well as the other courses, exercised a considerable influence on Dutch religious post-war architecture, a style that was referred to as the Bossche School. The course took place mainly in the evening or on weekends. Young architects would gather and discuss, and try to define, following Dom Hans van der Laan, the ultimate form suitable for a church through the study of the first Christian religious buildings. Through the course, Van der Laan embarked on his quest for ‘fundamental architectural laws’ (VDL C3 1946: 2):

The fact that we gather here, nor to discuss technical aspects, nor liturgical questions, but only to face the pure architectonic side of church building, is already without any doubt a clue for the direction that we shall take in our discussions. (…) What is it about when we build a house?

(VDL L1 1946: 1)⁵

The structure and approach of the scholastic framework initiated in his first lectures fulfilled the role of a blueprint for all of his following writings. Every lecture was structured according to 10–15 theorems. In 1960, this series was published as Le Nombre Plastique, and in 1977, it resulted in the publication of Architectonic Space (VDL 1960, 1977). For Van der Laan, only a well-proportioned building could induce ‘a sense of immanence’ fitted for prayer, and this essence needed to be taught (Voet 2017). Aiming to define architectural fundamentals, the initial lectures dealt with spatial concepts as inside and outside, and solid and void. He linked these to four principles identified by Vitruvius: order (ordination), arrangement (disposition), proportion (eurythmia), and symmetry (symmetria). In ancient times, symmetry by no means referred to mirror symmetry, as we know it now. It pointed to a certain mathematical harmony and measurable proportions between the sizes of the parts of a building, from the smallest up to the whole. Architecture had to be expressive by defining a clear order: building elements related to each other and to the building through whole numbers, clearly readable and countable through its disposition.

Van der Laan set out to formulate a proportional framework that could enable this symmetry. For him, the decimal system based on the number 10, which could then be divided into a literally symmetrical 5 + 5, proved to be inadequate to design spatial compositions as the ancients defined it. In order to achieve that, he chose the number 7 and divided it into 3 + 4, as the difference between 3 and 4 for him proved sufficient in order to perceive it as a composition of two clearly distinctive forms (Voet 2012). He named the 3 : 4 ratio the ‘Plastic Number’; the rational proportion that was fundamental to our discernment and our reading of space. Van der Laan defined the difference between 1 and 7 as the maximum between two forms, so that they still could be related to each other. With these numbers 1, 3, 4, and 7, he started composing hierarchical series. This all remained fairly abstract, until, in 1940, Van der Laan used two wooden blocks with sides that hierarchically interrelate as 3 : 4, his first official teaching tool (VDL C2 1940)⁶ (Figure 1.2a). The two wooden blocks are the first of a series of teaching aids that were used as tools in order to explain how space works, and how it can be composed through interrelated whole numbers.

FIGURE 1.2 (a) Dom Hans van der Laan’s first study tool to explain the plastic number. Two blocks where length, width, and height interrelate as 3 : 4. The largest measure of the smallest block is the smallest measure of the largest block (Cees Pouderoyen Privite Archives, photograph Caroline Voet). (b) The abacus, the first tool to test the student’s discernment, 1967 (VDLA). (c) Course on Church Architecture, Study from ‘Croquis’ by student architect J. A. Doncker, August 1953, teacher architect Cees Pouderoyen (Cees Pouderoyen Private Archives, photograph Caroline Voet). (d) Scheme with different orders of size with the plastic number, used on the drawing board of teacher architect Cees Pouderoyen (Cees Pouderoyen Private Archives, photograph Caroline Voet).

In order to train the architect’s discernment, Van der Laan developed a box with a continuous series of 144 bars (Figure 1.2b). With this, he could demonstrate the relations of the plastic number.⁷ The first model of a wooden box with ivory sticks was made in April 1952. He introduced it officially as...