Investigation“Rudolf Steiner, alternative thinker” (5/5). The Austrian philosopher designed several buildings in Switzerland, including the imposing Goetheanum, seat of the Anthroposophical Society. He wanted places expressing the human in its depth.
At the top of Dornach hill, not far from the beautiful city of Basel, a concrete temple with imposing volume and strange reliefs, soft and irregular like the surrounding Swiss mountains, dominates the landscape. This is the Goetheanum, headquarters of the General Anthroposophical Society, which houses its offices as well as a large performance hall. Its astonishing architecture inspired that of the houses nearby which are distinguished by their carved joinery, their roofs with soft reliefs like Dali’s watches, their rounded or bevelled windows – never square in any case.
The first houses grew there at the beginning of the XXe century, when a certain Emil Grosheintz, dentist by profession, offered the ground to the Austrian Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the founder of anthroposophy – a “science of the occult” embracing all human activities and aiming, through knowledge and spirituality, to unify the human being and the universe.
It was in the center of Munich, where he founded the movement, that he initially intended to establish himself, but his project stalled and the Swiss option, in 1913, seemed to him to be providential. Steiner moved to Dornach with his wife Marie, in a house at the foot of the hill where he lived until the last months of his life. His illness then forced him to take up residence in his workshop, right next to the Goetheanum, to continue working.
Impact of matter on the activity of the soul
Steiner studied design at the Technical University of Vienna, but never architecture. Like so many other activities he practiced, he exercised it as an autodidact – assisted by engineers and architects who drew up the plans. On the 180 houses and small equipment that have been established since arriving on the verdant hill, Steiner has designed eleven. Eleven satellites of the Goetheanum which are as many prototypes, all today classified – except one which burned -, to which we must add two others located in the neighboring town of Arlesheim. These buildings were also used by the founder of anthroposophy to lay the foundations for a philosophy of architecture inspired by his global thought: the idea that matter has a direct impact on the activity of the soul. .
This science of the mind, which at the time fascinated artists such as Vassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Hilma af Klint, postulates the existence of a spiritual reality that is just as objective as material reality, accessible to knowledge through meditation. The initiatory path imagined by Steiner combines theory and practice, and the shows given at the Goetheanum have the same vocation as the chalk drawings he draws during his lectures: to give the experience a physical feeling.
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