A single room for a monk or on living in the certainty of faith … “The game of doubting already implies certainty in advance!” (1) wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his posthumously in book-form published notes „On Certainty“. Vice versa one could declare that nothing – seen from a scientific perspective– is so uncertain as faith; at the same time little is so strong, in particular when we see which spaces, yes which architecture, faith has created. In these cases architecture and function can be experienced in their greatest entity. Function is not meant in the sense of modern functionalism, but in the sense of a spiritual, even metaphysical experience; a certainty of higher meaning than the one that can be reached by logic or science. A master of monasterial architecture was the monk Dom Hans van der Laan. To get into the mood we occupied ourselves with his work and theory; including a visit to his Convent for the Franciscan nuns at Waasmunster-Roosenberg! Whether we are faithful or not (naturally) didn´t play a role for the workshop. We didn´t expect anything apart the faith in “space”! Designing a monk’s cell, including all of the necessary furniture and constructing it as a 1:1 Mock-Up was the goal of our collaborative work during the ADSL-week 2015. We worked on the simplest elements of architecture and on putting them in relation to each other. The assignment was about a single room: a room with a door, a window, a bed, a table, a chair, a cupboard, a lamp and nothing else – perhaps a painting on the wall … an ontology of space and living so to say …

(1) #115.“Das Spiel des Zweifelns stetzt bereits die Gewissheit voraus!”, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit, Frankfurt am Main, 1997, P. 144