Rudolf Steiner and the First Goetheanum
Surrounded by the hills of the Swiss Jura, in Dornach, south of Basel, the Second Goetheanum and the buildings around it form an architectural ensemble based on a dynamic conception of form and space. Designed by Rudolf Steiner in 1924, it is the seat of the School of Spiritual Science and the Anthroposophical Society. This building of reinforced concrete, completed after Steiner’s death as his last legacy, was constructed on the foundations of an earlier building, the First Goetheanum, which burnt down as a result of arson on New Year’s Eve 1922.
The foundation stone of the First Goetheanum was laid in September 1913. Construction began in 1914 and continued throughout the First World War, with volunteers coming from many nations. Designed as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the Goetheanum was to become a platform for cultural renewal based on a broader understanding of humanity and the universe. Rudolf Steiner’s philosophical teaching—anthroposophy—extended into many disciplines, including pedagogy, medicine, economics, arts, eurythmy, curative education, architecture, and biodynamic agriculture, to all of which Steiner himself made significant contributions. As a result, institutions emerged across the world that researched, taught, practiced, and promoted the new approach to arts and sciences that Steiner advocated.
The building of the First Goetheanum was conceived like a living sculpture. The interiors and exteriors were mainly carved by hand, the domes covered with murals, natural light flowing into the building through stained glass windows that projected their colors into its space. The main material used in the construction was wood. The building featured an unusual structure of two intersecting domes of different sizes, yet this duality formed an integrated unity. The big dome covered the main hall, or auditorium, and the smaller one the stage, where dramatic, eurythmic, and musical performances took place as well as lectures and meetings.
Steiner’s ideas inspired many artists (Vasily Kandinsky was among those who attended his lectures) and in 1913 some of them headed to Dornach to take part in the construction of the Goetheanum. Hope was present on the construction site. There was a sense of responsibility and intensive engagement, a feeling that something new and culturally important was in the making. Russian volunteers included Andrei Bely, who arrived in Dornach in March 1914 and stayed for two years (he carved wooden columns and architraves), Margarita Sabashnikova, who also carved wood and painted the domes, and Anna (Asya) Turgeneva, who participated in various tasks but whose biggest contribution was the etchings and engravings for the glass windows. Oswald Dubach, born in Moscow, worked on pedestals and architraves. Dubach later became one of the Goetheanum’s main artists and founded its Fine Arts School together with Carl Kemper.
Arriving in Dornach from every corner of Europe, many of the artists had no previous experience of the artistic skills required and der Bau (the construction site) became a place of learning and discovery. New techniques were developed, such as glass engraving with wheel-driven carborundum stones, which was used for the first time for the windows of the Goetheanum. Steiner saw the project as a first step toward the development of a new aesthetic in arts and architecture, an attempt to integrate deep spiritual knowledge into a visible aesthetic language, which would have the potential for further development. In the Goetheanum he did not aim to impart abstract ideas: there were no symbols to be interpreted or explained. That which he wished to communicate was achieved through an immediate aesthetic experience of form, color, sound, and space. Astonishment was intended to be the first impression for anyone who entered the building, encouraging them to awaken inner forces and seek a deeper understanding of existence. The richness and complexity of spiritual reality cannot be truly expressed in a theoretical way, because rational and abstract thinking have their own boundaries. In the Goetheanum’s architecture Steiner aimed to make visible the continuous transformation of form, revealing changes and permanence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s idea of metamorphosis 1 was applied to the arts. The name given to the building was a homage to the great German poet and thinker.
Silvana Gabrielli
1. Goethe was a great admirer of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In a letter to his friend Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, he called himself (if slightly ironically) a pantheist. Nature played a very significant role in his creative work and philosophy, prompting some authors to associate him with the natural philosophy movement. In Metamorphosis of Plants (1790)—his biggest contribution to natural science—Goethe introduced to the understanding of nature the idea of constant development, evolution, and interaction of forms and compared the metamorphosis of plants to the constant changing of the world we live in. “The root,” he wrote, “is in fact no different from the stalk no different from the leaf, and the leaf no different from the flower: variations of the same idea.”