6 October 2025 – Arjen Ribbens interviewed me for NRC about the architecture of monk-architect Dom Hans van der Laan. His article appeared in the newspaper this Saturday. The title is: Gods own minimalist. Ribbens wrote:

Hans van der Heijden (1963), founder of a architects office for sustainable urban design and visiting professor of contemporary architectural practice at Liverpool University, has been an admirer of Van der Laan since his student days. He calls the plastic number difficult to follow. ‘Every architect needs a bit of theory like that.’ Just experience Van der Laan’s buildings, advises Van der Heijden. ‘They are of overwhelming beauty. At Delft University of Technology, my teachers spoke disparagingly about him. Occult! Catholic! But I often visited his abbey church near Vaals, and I also saw his monasteries in Sweden and Belgium. Stacking rough bricks on top of each other, with the joints in the same plane, and then roughly applying a thin layer of cement, so that the orange speckles of the bricks shine through the grey. Not only does this look modest and as if the building has been there for a long time, it is also architecture that needs no explanation. So it’s not for the cultural elite, but something my mother can understand too.”

In an arts centre in Liverpoolhe designed, Van der Laan’s influence is evident, says Van der Heijden—he copied Van der Laan’s brickwork, among other things. Van der Laan’s simplicity is an example of aesthetic sustainability, says Van der Heijden: “His buildings have eternal value.”