This year, David Chipperfield, an architect I've long admired, was awarded the Pritzker Prize, finally giving the world a reason to pause and appreciate the quiet power in his work. Chipperfield’s designs do not shout; they whisper, enveloping their users in spaces that are at once deeply humane and restrained. But this sense of reverence for architecture has roots in an unexpected figure—a little-known Benedictine monk and architect, Hans van der Laan.

Van der Laan’s story is one of devotion. He left Delft University, disillusioned with the rigid dogma he encountered, and joined a Benedictine monastery. There, amidst the solitude and discipline of monastic life, his passion for architecture rekindled. He designed St. Benedictusberg Abbey, tucked away at the Dutch-Belgian-German border—a place of rare serenity, where silence feels sacred, and time seems to pause.

Visiting the abbey years ago, I felt the profound calm of a world apart. Each step echoed through the chapel’s vastness; beams of light struck pews in a deep, inky blue—an intense shade, as if pulled from the abbey’s own shadows. Van der Laan had measured every detail with his own proportional system, using ratios like 4:3, believing them to be the essence of human perception. His spaces do not merely house people; they hold their quiet contemplation, framing the simplicity, the depth of life itself.