| Description: |
|
Product Description
At the time it was built, anthroposophists saw the Goetheanum in its present form, enthroned halfway up the side of the Birs valley near Basel, merely as a memorial to the first Goetheanum, that burnt down on New Years Night 1922. Marie Steiner, Rudolf Steiner's wife, called the new building "a plainer spiritual home". But in the six and a half decades of its existence the massive concrete structure has not just stood the test of time as the centre of the anthroposophical movement. It has also turned out to be a singular phenomenon in the architecture of the 20th century, ultimately comparable with nothing but itself.The present Goetheanum was opened on Saturday 29 September 1928. Since this day the building has played host to key Dornach activities for the Anthroposophical Society and the Freie Hochschule for Geisteswissenschaft. Rooms and activities cannot be read from the building in the way twenties architectural functionlism used to require. Gestures of inclusion, protection and vaulting dominate. The building forms a unified whole, sheltered by a unified roof. As a structure, the Goetheanurn drops hints about its internal dispositions and purposes, but nothing more. In this it resembles an organic creature, and is indeed reminiscent of one, cowering on its mountain spur, its organs hidden by a bodily covering. The text by Cologne architectural historian Wolfgang Pehnt, who had tried once before to place the Dornach buildings in architectural history in his book Expressionist Architecture, is an analysis by an outsider, someone not working from anthroposophical conviction. Pehnt explains the role and achievement of these unusual buildings. He runs over past history andsketches the effect of the Goetheanum right down to the present day. But even this unprejudiced chronicler finds that the Dornach buildings are of incomparable originality, early examples of organic architecture, daring both artistically and technically, and an appeal in stone to find and sustain one's own originality. Thomas Dix has taken new pictures of the second Goetheanum and the other buildings by Steiner in Dornach for the present volume. He shows the complex at various times of the day and the year, in morning mist, in strong afternoon shadow, and at night, when the main building becomes a hollowed-out mountain massif, with colours light pouring out of the apertures.
|
