Dom Hans van der Laan’s Architectonic Space: A Peculiar Blend of Architectural Modernity and Religious Tradition

This article discusses the design methodology of the Benedictine monk-architect Dom Hans van der Laan (1904–91), famous for his manifesto De Architectonische Ruimte (Architectonic Space, 1977), in which he proposed his ideal elementary architecture. In the past, this ideal achitecture was linked to Van der Laan’s proportional system and to his general approach as an architect rather than to his Catholic background. Consequently, the changing conceptual landscape in which he developed his ideas on the relation between religion and design was neglected. Yet, as this article will argue, it is only by carefully exploring the relation between Van der Laan’s attempts to define a fundamental architecture and his ambition to understand the religious traditions they may have sprung from that one can understand how his religion and design methodology influenced each other. Based on unedited primary sources (letters, notes, design sketches, lectures), this article reveals forgotten interconnections between Van der Laan’s religious and architectural thinking. By analysing these motifs, it offers new insights on the interrelationships between religion and architecture that go beyond the traditionalist-modernist dichotomy.     

Resistance politics of non-violence: Jean Paulhan’s ’Fautrier the Enraged’ (1943)

ABSTRACT

The idea of adequately ‘representing’ violence was an important point of discussion amongst Resistance artists and intellectuals at the time of the French Occupation. In particular, intellectual resistant Jean Paulhan had written on the subject in his text introducing Jean Fautrier’s retrospective exhibition of November and December 1943 in occupied Paris, ‘Fautrier the Enraged’. While the thematic of the exhibition proposed an academic and traditional subject matter, Paulhan demonstrated that Fautrier’s typically matierist and anti-naturalistic approach was instrumental in ‘suggesting reality’. Fautrier’s individual creative process, Paulhan argued, led to a transparent experience to be shared between viewer and artist not only on an aesthetic level, but also from a political point of view. At the time of ‘Fautrier the Enraged”s writing, Paulhan had indeed been concerned with issues of political engagement, as is evident from his essay ‘The Flowers of Tarbes or Terror in Literature’ (1941), which reflects upon the human condition and is concerned with reconciling poetry, politics and ethics. The author believes that such questions were being addressed in Paulhan’s text on Fautrier and by Fautrier’s art and that an aesthetic reading of Paulhan’s text is inseparable from a political interpretation of Fautrier’s art within the context of the Occupation. Indeed, the aesthetic criteria used in Paulhan’s text as framework to his argument were then loaded with political meaning. For instance, Paulhan considered virtuosity as an essential artistic characteristic to be opposed to the art of imitation based on the technical ability to observe and simulate ‘nature’ as imposed by the occupants. With excerpts from Paulhan’s essay and exchange of letters with Fautrier as well as visual analysis of some of the artworks presented in the exhibition, this paper deals with the wider issues of ‘representation’ in the historical and cultural context of the Second World War in France.