This volume collects the three books of the Dutch monk and architect Hans van der Laan (1904-1991): three refounding theses of an extraordinary intellectual and creative power. In his books, architectural works and numerous designs of clothes, pottery, furniture and various other artifacts, Van der Laan offers an overview of the relationship between man, nature and their Creator. His theory of the Plastic Number reconnects the quantitative order of architecture to the perceptive and cognitive nature of man and redefines proportion as one of the roots of human, universal and objective intelligence.

In The Architectonic Space, Van der Laan collects this redefinition of proportion within one of the most developed and comprehensive architectural theories that history has ever known. In Plays of Forms, Van der Laan broadens his phenomenological research to the whole world of human culture which not only transforms and completes the world of nature, but also serves to establish the world of liturgical artifacts. Born from teaching and intended for teaching, the three treatises, presented here for the first time all together, offer a series of lessons that summarize a long-life research that must be systematically retraced, tested, enlarged and deepened.