Architecture, Sculpture and Painting of the First Goetheanum

GA 288 — 14 January 1916, Basel

II. Misconceptions about the Spiritual Research and the Building Dedicated to it in Dornach

Last winter, from this same place, I already tried to speak about the outer, as yet unfinished, emblem of spiritual scientific research, the Dornach building. It is quite understandable that this Dornach building is still the subject of many, many misunderstandings today; for just as it is true that it is based on purely artistic principles and not on anything symbolic or similar, it is equally true that it presents itself to the world as something quite different from what one has been accustomed to seeing in buildings or artistic expression. He contradicts previous artistic views in many respects, just as spiritual science contradicts and must contradict the habits of thinking in the previous scientific view. Why is this the case?

As was shown the day before yesterday, spiritual science, in its entirety, leads to a different way of thinking, or rather, to a transformation of thinking, leading to an activity of the soul that arises from thinking, which lives much more in reality than ordinary pictorial thinking, which wants to give nothing other than a reproduction of external reality. While ordinary thinking must see its value precisely in the fact that the ideas it awakens are faithful replicas of an external reality, nothing directly experienced by oneself, but only something re-experienced from external reality, what develops out of thinking through the spiritual research method must be something that the soul experiences directly. The soul should not have to rise into an image, but into real life, into the objective thought-being of the world. And so it is with what develops out of the will. But through this, the soul also comes to live more fully in what otherwise emerges instinctively as the artistic, as the stylistically appropriate, as the artistic formation. That is the essential thing in soul activities, which come to light in the soul through spiritual research, that the soul becomes more immersed in spiritual reality.

And by becoming immersed in spiritual reality, it also immerses itself differently in the world of forms, in the world of shaping. But through this it is led not to set something other than art in the place of art, but to approach art in a different way. While other art must start from what presents itself to the senses, and what presents itself to the senses can be elevated into the spiritual – so that this art appears as something elevated out of the sensory world, that which one has ascended to, until there is a spiritual molding of the outer sensual reality. What one can call the artistic grasp of the spiritual science is something that takes the opposite path. Man then stands first in the spiritual. He lives vividly the weaving and living of spiritual events, he faces the spirit as spirit. And when there is the possibility of artistic activity in him, when art is to come into being, then, not as happens in other art, as has happened in art up to now, the sense perception is led upwards until one can give it the radiance of the spiritual, but the spiritual is led down into the material.

Above all, this is the essential thing that should be striven for in the architecture of the Dornach building, for example. The first question was: What has to be done here? And in relation to this thought, there was no question of how to create a building out of the previous architectural style, out of what is otherwise common or can be learned in architecture. Instead, there was a completely different question, one whose practical answer shows how one has to deal with spiritual science quite differently in the direct than with ordinary logical thinking or with the ordinary activities of the soul in general.

When a fruit forms a shell around itself, then what is separated as the shell has emerged and grown out of the same life forces as the fruit itself with its individual formations. And anyone who observes, for example, how the kernel of the nut forms the shell around it with all the fine veins, will say to themselves: the nutshell comes from the same forces as the kernel itself. This nutshell is not formed in such a way that one could somehow imagine a style that should give a shell around the nut; the whole is one. And so it must become one: what is done in the Dornach building, the forces that prevail in what will be presentations and representations from the spiritual-scientific world view, what messages are from the spiritual world, what thoughts and ideas are developed. All this is, so to speak, the core life.

But the same forces that prevail in this core life must also be used to form the shell. This must be a unity, just as in every natural fruit, the shell and core are a unity and are formed from the same forces. The question could never arise: Which architectural style can be applied here? Rather, the whole building was given its form by the intention of realizing a spiritual idea in the structure; the two-dome form, which brings everything together (Figs. 1-9), really came about in this way. It had to be a unity. And so, in a certain way, the walls also had to become something other than walls have been up to now (Figs. 10-17). But it is significant, especially for the understanding of the unique art that is to be developed there — still quite primitive in its beginnings — that this is taken into account.

Walls, even those that have been artistically designed and especially these, have meant an end in previous art. Even in the Greek architectural works of art, walls mean an end; they close off from the outside world. Spiritual science, by virtue of what it is, should lead out into spiritual expanses. Therefore, forms must arise on the walls, as sculptural formations and the like, which cause the walls, when looking at the forms, to destroy themselves, so that one has the feeling: By living in the building and directing one's gaze to the forms, one has something in the forms that leads out into the world.

And yet one had to be in touch with all of reality. Therefore, the kind of window art that had existed in the past or still exists today, developed out of the old art, could not be created as window art. Instead, a kind of window etching, if you may call it that, was used (Fig. 102, 103). The figurative is now worked into the variously colored glass panels, each one in a different color, in such a way that the thickening and thinning of the glass achieves what is to be artistically achieved. And then the sunlight shining in will interact with it, that is, that which works and weaves in nature itself, to make the work of art complete. There, nature will intertwine with art to form a unified work of art.

Thus, new approaches had to be taken in the most diverse ways. In painting, which will fill the domes (Figs. 29, 53, 55), the aim was to treat the colors in a very specific way. Of course, I can only hint at these things in a fragmentary way. In treating colors in a figurative way, something should be attempted that is not usually attempted with color. The aim should be to experience color directly. Everything that the soul engages in through spiritual research should be experienced inwardly. The color should not be merely superficial; rather, the color should have inner life and develop this inner life itself, so that life itself arises out of the corresponding color and color composition.

When you look at the painted work of art, you should immediately feel the interaction of the color and that which lives out of the color into the form. You should have the feeling: you live in what is alive in the color, what is alive in the form, you grasp reality in the color, not through the color; you grasp the reality behind the color. Colors should express themselves, forms should express themselves, not something through colors, not something through forms. For this is precisely what living with the spiritual world leads to: not adhering to some model, but bringing what is living and weaving in the spiritual fact and in the spiritual essence into the weaving of the colors and into the life of the forms that one now brings onto the surface. And this special feature had to be striven for, for the reason that the whole of the structure, like the 'shell', was intended for spiritual science, which arises from the same forces as spiritual science itself.

For example, we also had to depart from the principle of placing columns, each of which is always the same as the one before, columns with capitals that are all the same as each other. A certain development had to be followed from the first pair of columns with their capitals to the second and so on (Figs. 31-52). This gives an inner design, an inner development, as nature itself does, by developing the other tones, the second, the third and so on, from the fundamental, from the prime. And just as it is not superstition or some kind of mystical madness to see seven tones in the scale and the eighth tone as a repetition of the fundamental, so it is not something mystically mysterious to seek a progression in the inner motives of the capitals and thereby arrive at the number seven for the columns quite naturally, because in this number we stand in the creative process of the world with the spiritual, just as the creative element in nature lives in the creative process itself. Thus a parallelism emerges between what is present in nature in a primitive form, such as the seven tones of the musical scale and the seven colors of the rainbow, and what occurs in the spiritual realm. The strange thing is that people looked at this building in Dornach and thought that seven columns had been chosen here because of some superstitious belief about the number seven. The same people might also say: What a grotesque superstition it is that the rainbow has seven colors, or that the tone scale has seven tones! It would be the same logic, one as the other. One as the other is demanded by the nature of the facts.

If someone comes and says: Well, yes, you would like to be able to agree with what is there in the building. But that you do such superstitious things or such mystical stuff as seven pillars, and made of seven different woods to boot — anyone who speaks like that is like someone who says: I don't understand why each string on a violin has to be different, they could all be the same. It will be a matter of realizing that what leads from spiritual science to art corresponds, as it were, to the whole purpose of spiritual research work.