Architecture E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The origins and nature of Architecture; The formative influence of architectural forms; The history of Architecture in the light of mankind's spiritual evolution; A new Architecture as a means of uniting with spiritual forces; Art and Architecture as manifestations of spiritual realities; Metamorphosis in Architecture; Aspects of a new Architecture; Rudolf Steiner on the first Goetheanum building; The second Goetheanum building; The Architecture of a community in Dornach; The temple is the human being; The restoration of the lost temple.

Leseprobe

ARCHITECTURE

Also in this series:

(Practical Applications)

Agriculture

Art

Education

Medicine

Religion

Science

Social and Political Science

(Esoteric)

Alchemy

Atlantis

Christian Rozenkreutz

The Druids

The Goddess

The Holy Grail

RUDOLF STEINER

ARCHITECTURE

An Introductory Reader

Compiled with an introduction, commentary and notes by Andrew Beard

Sophia Books

All translations revised by Matthew Barton

Sophia Books An imprint of Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

For earlier English publications of individual selections please see Sources

The material by Rudolf Steiner was originally published in German in various volumes of the ‘GA’ (Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. This authorized volume is published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach (for further information see Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures)

This edition translated © Rudolf Steiner Press 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 341 7

Cover design by Andrew Morgan Design Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

Contents

Introduction by Andrew Beard

Part One

1. The Origins and Nature of Architecture

2. The Formative Influence of Architecture on the Human Being

3. The History of Architecture in the Light of Mankind’s Spiritual Evolution

4. A New Architecture as a Means of Uniting with Spiritual Forces

5. Art and Architecture as Manifestations of Spiritual Realities

6. Metamorphosis in Architecture

7. Aspects of a New Architecture

8. Rudolf Steiner on the First Goetheanum Building

9. The Second Goetheanum Building

10. The Architecture of a Community in Dornach

Part Two The Temple Legend: underlying esoteric aspects of Steiner’s vision

11. The Temple is the Human Being

12. The Restoration of the Lost Temple

Notes

Sources

Bibliography

Further Reading

Illustration Credits

Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures

Introduction

By Andrew Beard

The contents of this book are drawn mainly from lectures given at different times and places between 1905 and 1924. They are assembled under what I hope are useful headings, allowing the reader to navigate through a landscape with many different features.

Part One begins with Steiner’s understanding of the nature and origins of architecture. From there it moves to a discussion of how architectural forms affect and influence the human being and how this influence has accompanied mankind’s cultural development. Chapters 4-7 are concerned with Steiner’s view of the spiritual dimension of architecture and its task in our present age, particularly his interest in finding architectural expression for processes of metamorphic change and evolution. In chapters 8-10 Steiner talks directly about his two major architectural works, the first and second Goetheanum buildings and the community of buildings around them.

Part Two is based on the Temple Legend, relating to the origins of human life on earth and containing an image of the human being as a temple in which the divinity is represented by the human ‘I’ or ego. According to this legend the future of humanity depends on recovering and restoring the lost ‘temple’ of the human body and the earth.

Rudolf Steiner and the modern movement in art and architecture

Rudolf Steiner’s architectural work can be seen in the context of the pioneering days of modern architecture. His active period as an architect, from around 1907 to 1924 coincides with landmark buildings by Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. Most historians who have sought to place his work have identified connections with an earlier generation of art nouveau artists and designers such as Victor Horta in Belgium, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland and others. Steiner’s work has also been seen as part of the expressionist stream whose members can be said to include Antonio Gaudi, Saint Elia, Herman Finsterlin, the earlier work of Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Scharoun and Eero Saarinen. Steiner’s Goetheanum buildings could be seen as built examples of the ‘Volkhaus’ (house of the people) or ‘Stadtkrone’ (city crown) advocated by Bruno Taut, among others, as cultural centres representing secular versions of the medieval cathedral.1 Other, more recent names could be added to the list of architects whose work includes expressionist elements, such as the American Frank Gehry, who built the well-known Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Hungarian Imre Makovecz, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and recent work by the Italian Renzo Piano, co-designer of the ‘high-tech’ Centre Pompidou in Paris.

As time goes on, however, it is possible that Steiner’s work may be seen in a broader context than art nouveau, which preceded it, and early expressionism with which it coincided. In common with all the pioneers of modern art and architecture Steiner railed against the degeneracy of most nineteenth-century architecture, with its eclectic plagiarism of former styles. Our present age, he believed, requires a complete renewal of all the arts,2 a renewal, however, based on a return to the fundamental principles inherent in art and architecture which find expression through different ages and cultures. For example, the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier was inspired by the archetypal quality of ancient Greek architecture and its use of the laws of proportion, inherent in the human body and reproduced in the ordering of architectural space and forms. The resonance which Le Corbusier experienced between the proportion of the ‘golden section’ and the human body should not be dismissed as a whim. As he put it, ‘Mathematica (is) herself the daughter of the universe.’3

Le Corbusier is one example of an architect who is not necessarily thought of as working from a spiritual perspective. However, the spiritual dimension embraced by many pioneers of twentieth-century art and design is now becoming better known and understood. Kandinsky’s essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art is a well-known example, but there are many others.4

Detail of the second Goetheanum building begun in 1925 by Rudolf Steiner

TWA airline terminal at JFK Airport New York, by Eero Saarinen, 1956-62

Le Corbusier’s ‘Modulor Man’, as he became known, showing the relationship between the human body and the proportions of the ‘golden section’.

A more direct connection can be argued between Steiner’s architectural work and the so-called ‘organic‘ stream. In the sense that organic architecture is inspired by natural forms, particularly plant forms, comparisons can be made between art nouveau buildings and Steiner’s first Goetheanum. Steiner’s interest in morphology, however, went beyond the outer appearance of natural forms and was more concerned with the laws according to which forms come into being. This particular interest was shared by the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, who was responsible for the aphorism ‘Form follows function’. This expression has been interpreted in different ways by different architects but Steiner would have said that form is a direct outcome of the activity it supports and the context in which it arises, without any preconceptions by the designer, including a preconceived style. In this sense ‘organic architecture’ does not so much involve imitating the external appearance of natural forms but getting inside nature’s skin and applying her methods to produce a unique solution to each problem. Here, Steiner can be placed alongside masters like Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Hugo Haaring and Hans Scharoun.

The central importance of metamorphosis

Morphology (the science of the form of plants and animals) is an aspect that Steiner saw as central to his intentions as a designer, and was also of interest to other contemporaries. As well as Sullivan and, interestingly, Le Corbusier’s teacher Charles L’Eplattenier among others, there was the English scientist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson whose book On Growth and Form was first published in 1917. Steiner’s main inspiration, however, was derived from Goethe’s scientific work, specifically his discovery of the metamorphic process of development in plant growth and, subsequently, in a number of other natural phenomena which take place in time. In fact it became clear to Goethe that metamorphic change underlies all processes of development in the natural world. Steiner later extended the field by means of ‘spiritual-scientific’ research and found that human and indeed cosmic evolution is based on metamorphosis.6

The Berlin Philharmonia concert hall by Hans Scharoun, 1956-63. ‘Can it be an accident that wherever improvised music is heard people tend to gather around the performers in a circle. The psychological basis for this natural process seems self-evident to all; it had only to be transposed into a concert hall.’5

For Goethe, metamorphosis became the key to understanding the transformation of the amorphous undifferentiated substance of the seed into a plant form with its stages of shooting, leafing, flowering, fruiting, and finally seeding again.

By introducing the principle of metamorphic transformation into architectural form, Steiner was doing two things which had not been attempted before. Firstly he was introducing an essentially time-based phenomenon to a spatial art. Secondly, in doing so, he was giving artistic expression to what he saw as the underlying laws of Creation. This may sound ambitious, at the very least, and Steiner was very conscious of the magnitude of the task he was undertaking. He felt, however, that a beginning should be made. To understand his reasons for doing so we need to look at Steiner’s view of the nature and task of architecture in the context of human evolution, and our present stage of human development.

Rudolf Steiner’s cosmology—metamorphosis on a macrocosmic scale

In Steiner’s cosmology the entire development of the world progresses through a series of great metamorphoses or transformations. It is characteristic of metamorphosis that form appears, disappears and reappears, and that what happens between one form and its reappearance in a transformed state is as significant as what manifests in each form. Thus the process has a rhythmic, musical quality like the notes in a scale and the intervals between them.

Altogether, Steiner identified seven ‘planetary conditions’ of Earth evolution, of which our present ‘Earth condition’ is the fourth and central stage.7 This seven-stage process follows an inherent lawfulness and is an archetypal metamorphic pattern of change and development, in which an initial form develops by stages to a point of complexity, and then becomes progressively simplified until, finally, a new and higher manifestation of the form is attained.

The spiritual origins of the human body and architecture

Steiner described architecture as arising ‘...when we project the specific organization of the human body into the space outside it.. .’8 By ‘specific organization’ he was referring to the underlying spiritual organization of the body, laid down in the Old Saturn stage of our evolution (see note 7). As he put it, ‘Architecture would never have come into being if man did not now carry within himself the laws which were imprinted on his physical body during the Old Saturn period.’ This is one of the enigmas of architecture—that the most material of the arts has its origin in the earliest stage of evolution whose origins, according to Steiner, began in a spiritual environment long before matter existed.

Those who practise, or contemplate, architecture know that it is primarily concerned with the proportions of its elements and the quality of the spaces they enclose. These are, fundamentally, non-material in character. Goethe, for example, called architecture ‘frozen music’.

In its primal stage of development then, the human body was a kind of non-material form composed of forces which only later became filled out and ‘embodied’ in matter. The purest aspect of this materialized form of the body which we have today is the skeleton, the equivalent of the structure which underlies any architectural work. Steiner referred to this aspect of the human body as the ‘physical body’ to distinguish it from the aspects of the human being which developed in subsequent evolutionary stages.

The life body and metamorphosis

In the second stage of planetary evolution, called ‘Old Sun’, the human ‘life body’ or ‘etheric body’ had its beginnings. This life body is essentially a rhythmic system of forces which animates and maintains the physical body. Without it, the body would be an inanimate corpse. Steiner refers to the etheric body as the ‘architect of the physical body’, exerting a formative influence on it. The etheric body is part of the ‘etheric world’, which is characterized by time processes—of which metamorphosis is the most typical.9 In making metamorphosis the basis for a new approach to architectural form Steiner was therefore giving expression in physical architectural space to the etheric world’s formative time processes. He was, in a sense, raising the dead matter of architecture into the sphere of life. His reason for doing so becomes apparent if we follow the story further.

The origins of consciousness

During the third stage of planetary evolution, known as ‘Old Moon’, the beginnings of human soul life and emotion arose (or, in spiritual-scientific terminology, the ‘astral body’) as the basis for consciousness. With our soul/astral body we respond to all outer experiences and make them part of our inner/emotional life. This includes impressions made by art and architecture. In chapter 2 Steiner discusses the effect of architectural forms on us, which are initially absorbed by the soul and then work right down into the physical body. Chapter 4 contains a lecture discussing how the soul’s unconscious affinity with geometry enables the spiritual world to ‘speak’ to us through the underlying geometry of architectural forms.

The self-conscious ego and physical matter

By the beginning of our present stage of evolution, the human being had thus developed a physical body, a ‘life body’ and an ‘astral body’ during the Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon stages of evolution. A fourth member of our being, the ‘I’ or ‘ego’, is being incorporated during this current evolutionary phase, known as ‘Earth’. This ‘I’ is the spiritual core unique to each human being. It is the youngest and least developed aspect of the human being but, to the extent that we can gain access to it, the ‘I’ enables us to take charge of our own destiny.

The human being’s role in future stages of evolution

During our present ‘Earth’ stage of evolution, the spiritual substance of previous stages has condensed into physical matter. The development of matter at the same time as the development of the human ‘I’ produces a new situation in evolution. The spatial separation between human beings and their environment, arising through the fact that we now ‘inhabit’ material bodies, creates a basis for objectivity and freely determining—to some extent—how much, and in what way, we interact with the world. At the same time, this condensing process has the effect of obscuring spiritual forces which underlie the world as we experience it with our normal, physical senses.

Having created the fourfold human being in this way, the spiritual world has withdrawn from our field of vision, thus leaving us free to take responsibility for ourselves and play an essential part in the future course of our cosmic evolution. This future involves further transformation of the human being and our world over the course of the three ‘planetary conditions’ to come.10

Today we face the challenge of seeing through the apparently material nature of the physical body to its underlying spiritual form which originated in Old Saturn, to which it will ultimately return at the end of planetary evolution, at a transformed level.11

The future task of architecture

As Steiner saw it, architecture has a central part to play in this process of spiritualization because its laws are also those of the physical body. The great mystery behind both is that these laws are, ultimately, non-material. This is true, even of the laws of levity and gravity (see chapter 1). All architecture worthy of the name makes these laws visible in artistic form, through its proportions and the expression given to its load-bearing elements. The new architecture, Steiner argued, needs to include a further element by expressing the laws of metamorphosis visibly in space. By doing so, he believed, human beings will be able to experience at first hand the underlying spiritual processes through which the human body and the universe were formed. We can then begin to live with these processes so that they become living faculties and capacities, through which we and potentially the world can be transformed.

The reality of reincarnation

The long-term project of transforming the world depends on a continuity of individual human consciousness. Otherwise, the notion of a self-determining free human spirit, or ‘ego’, is not a reality. In Steiner’s view, therefore, each individual human spirit returns to earth to renew the task of serving its needs and furthering the course of evolution. Thus all previous and future stages of evolution are accompanied by the evolution and development of each human being. Just as the earth is evolving through a process of metamorphosis, so is each one of us too. Every human life is a metamorphic development of the last life, and during the interval between lives we digest our previous one and prepare our tasks and challenges for the next. To Steiner, therefore, reincarnation is a reality that underpins his entire work. For example, in chapter 2 we find a discussion of the influence of architectural forms on the form of the human body over ‘millennia’, for which reincarnation is the underlying principle.

Principles of transformation in science and art

There are two themes recurring in Steiner’s work that are strongly represented in his discourses on architecture. One, derived originally from Goethe, is that art and science are different representations of the same truths. Thus the theme of metamorphosis, for example, can be observed in nature but can also be represented artistically. This point is taken up in the introduction to chapter 5 and is the background to chapter 6.

The second theme is that art has its own lawfulness which is different from the laws and methods of science. Time and again Steiner emphasized, for example, that the forms he incorporated into his first Goetheanum building arose from purely artistic imagination. They were not translations of concepts into symbols, as might be thought from a first encounter with them.

Furthermore, the transforming power of art became central to Steiner’s whole endeavour of stimulating people to take responsibility for their own destiny and working towards creating a new world order. As he might have said: science can understand the world, but only art can create a new world.

PART ONE

1. The Origins and Nature of Architecture

It is a most remarkable fact that architecture in its highest forms does not bear the least resemblance to anything in nature, that it is peculiarly and exclusively a human work; and yet, long before man came to need it, long before the foundation of the world, at the very beginning, in the councils of eternity, the laws which regulate the art were formed.

Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson (1817-75)

The following extracts are taken from a lecture series given in 1914. In the first, Steiner gives a picture of the relationship between the laws of architecture and the nature of ‘Old Saturn’, during which both the universe and the human physical body had their origins and from which architecture derives its essential nature.

The second extract is concerned with the supersensible forces at work in the physical body, without which we literally could not lift a finger. As Steiner describes it, architecture arises when these forces are projected into space. In this connection he refers to two kinds of forces. One is ‘...a spatial system of lines and forces ... which forms our physical body through the activity of our etheric body’. The other is the interaction of weight and support, discussed in the third extract. This is both a sensible and a supersensible phenomenon and Steiner presents a kind of architectural meditation in which he invites us to experience the forces of gravity, levity and balance inwardly and, in doing so, to become conscious of the spiritual beings who underlie them.

Taking these passages together we find a profound expression of architecture’s potential to become spiritual experience. If through architecture, forces which exist and work within us are reflected back to us from surrounding space, so that our inner world becomes, in a sense, our outer environment—as Steiner tells us also happens in our life after death—then the effect of architecture on our inner life can be that ‘... our soul is now no longer only within our body’s skin but belongs to the cosmos’.

The cosmic origins of architecture

Architecture would never have come into being if human beings did not now carry within themselves the laws imprinted on their physical bodies during the Old Saturn period. The human being mysteriously projects into the laws of architecture all that he took into his being during the ancient Saturn period. Obviously we have to use such means as are at our disposal today. But the essential and living elements in our architectural activities stem from what was implanted in us during Old Saturn evolution.

Let us enter still deeper into the matter, which we thus place before our souls. What does the human being do when he becomes totally absorbed in the creativity of architecture, either as architect or as the observer or admirer of architecture? He lives within the Saturn laws of his physical body. When he immerses himself entirely in the laws of architecture, he becomes once more a ‘Saturn’ being. All the impressions produced by architecture, its austerity, its chaste proportions, its silence which is yet so eloquent, result from the fact that we immerse ourselves in what was given us by the spirits of the higher hierarchies1 who were active at the beginning of the Saturn period.

So when human beings create or enjoy architecture (I mean, of course, when this is practised as a true art), they really lift themselves not only out of present earthly existence but also out of the more distant past, placing themselves back once more into the phase of Saturn evolution.2

Forces at work in the body...

In our ego we can only contain the thought of lifting a hand; this thought must at once act upon the astral body, and the astral body transfers its activity, which lives in it as an impulse, to the etheric body.3 And what happens then? Let us assume that someone is holding his hand in a horizontal position. Now he forms the idea: I want to raise my hand a little bit higher. The idea, which in life is followed by the act of lifting the hand, passes over to the astral body; there an impulse arises and passes over from the astral body to the etheric body. And now the following happens in the etheric body: the hand is at first horizontal; then the etheric body is drawn up higher, and then the physical hand moves, following what occurs first as a development of force in the etheric body. The physical hand thus follows the etheric.

In the life of our organism we are continually dealing with a development of force followed by a state of equilibrium. Of course the human being has no conscious knowledge of what is really going on within him, but what takes place is so infinitely wise that the cleverness of the human ego is nothing by comparison. We would be unable to move a hand if we had to depend on our own cleverness and knowledge alone, for the subtle forces developed by the astral body in the etheric body and then passed on to the physical body are quite inaccessible to ordinary human knowledge. And the wisdom developed in this process is millions of times greater than that required by a watchmaker in making a watch.

We do not usually think of this, but this wisdom actually has to be developed. The moment the ‘I’ sends the impulses of its idea into the astral body we need the help of another being, one belonging to the hierarchy of the angels. For even the tiniest movement of a finger we need the assistance of such a being, whose wisdom is far in advance of our own. We could do nothing but lie on the earth immobile, making concepts in utter rigidity, if the beings of the higher hierarchies did not constantly surround us with their activity. Therefore the first step towards initiation is to gain an understanding of how these forces act upon the human being.

... and projected into architecture

I have tried to show here what is involved even in a movement as simple as resting the head in the hand. If we carry this spatial system of lines and forces, which is constantly active in us, out into the world, and if we organize matter according to this system, then architecture arises. All architecture consists in separating from ourselves this system of forces and placing it outside us in space. Thus we may say: Here we have the outer boundary of our physical body, and if we push the inner organization, which has been impressed by the etheric body on to the physical body, outside this boundary, then architecture arises. All the laws present in the architectural utilization of matter are also to be found in the human body. When we project the specific organization of the human body into the space outside it, then we have architecture.

Now we know, in our way of looking at things, that the etheric body is attached to the physical body. Looking once more at any work of architecture, what can we say about it? We can say that here, carried into the space exterior to us, is the interaction between vertical and horizontal and between forces that react together, all of which are otherwise to be found within the human physical body.4

Basic elements of architecture, body, soul and cosmos

We shall gain a lot if, for instance, as well as just seeing this diagram, we try and immerse ourselves in it and try to feel what is going on: weight pressing down here, and weight being supported there.