Pastoor van Ars Church

in the Hague, Netherlands

Photos by Meihui Qi

My works are also on

Instagram

In 1963 Aldo van Eyck was commissioned to design the Roman Catholic Church of the parish of Pastoor van Ars in Loosduinen, a district in the north-west of The Hague near to the sea. He once described his attitude to the design of this church: "Although neither Catholic nor anything else, I have over the years been familiar with innumerabie churches and sacred places of all sorts; entering them, staying for a while, then leaving again (as an architect-tourist, for the sake of the architecture) whilst noticing with detachment what takes place there. lt is from this accumulated secular experience that l started on both the present and the previous church (‘The Wheels of Heaven’), confident that specific paradoxes appertaining to the subject could still be translated into architecture. Far from wishing to secularize (i.e. neutralize or banalize) what for others is sacred, I have in both cases tried, as an outsider, to mitigate the outworn hierarchy’s irreversibility; persuading it to become hence more reversible- relative. Only the mild gears of reciprocity I thought could help me here."