The Ideas Behind the Building of the Goetheanum (Der Baugedanke des Goetheanum), catalogued as GA 289 in Rudolf Steiner's collected works, belongs to the group of illustrated lectures in which he walked visitors around the first Goetheanum and explained why it had been shaped as it was. Two of these lectures are available in English translation at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, both given at Dornach, on 28 and 30 December 1921, to guests attending a lecture course in the building itself. They stand as chapters nine and ten under the running title "The Living Organic Style," the first subtitled Form: The Creative Forces of Nature, the second Art: A Revelation of the Secret Laws of Nature. Their core subject is one question turned over from many sides: what happens to architecture when a building is asked to grow out of its purpose rather than be assembled around it?
Place in Steiner's Work
These talks sit in the middle of a long argument Steiner had been making since at least 1914, when construction at Dornach began. He was not writing architectural theory from a study. He had made the model, chosen the materials, and worked on the carving, and here he is describing a building he is standing inside, to people who have just walked through its doors. That gives the volume a quality no other part of his output has: it is commentary delivered on site, by the maker, about an object the listener can turn and look at.
The timing carries its own weight. The first Goetheanum burned on the night of 31 December 1922, almost exactly one year after the second of these lectures. Everything Steiner points to here, the carved capitals, the engraved windows, the painted domes, the wooden interior, was lost within twelve months. What survives is the description, the photographs, and the reasoning. Reading GA 289 is therefore closer to reading a guide to a vanished cathedral than to reading a work of aesthetics.
Intellectually the volume runs on Goethe. Steiner had spent his early career editing Goethe's scientific writings, and the idea of metamorphosis, that the leaves of a plant are one form appearing in many shapes, is the engine of the whole architectural scheme. He also sends listeners back to his own earlier work, referring them to the opening chapter of Riddles of Philosophy for the historical claim that the Greeks perceived thought in the outer world much as we now perceive colour. The building, in his account, is that claim made in wood and concrete.
Themes and Structure
The first lecture works outward from a single principle: form must follow from what the form contains. Steiner reaches for two homely images to say it. A nutshell takes its shape from the same forces that shaped the nut inside it, so the shell of a spiritual movement must be shaped by what goes on within. And a Viennese cake mould must be conceived so that the right cake can be baked in it. Neither image is decorative. Both refuse the alternative he was arguing against, which was to commission a building in some existing style and then put anthroposophy inside it. A movement that expresses itself only in maxims, he says, can be housed in anything; one that means to flow into art, religion, and social life cannot.
From there he moves through the building's parts. The lower storey is concrete, the upper storey wood, and each demanded a different way of working. In stone you attend to the convexities and work the form out of what rises; in wood you attend to the hollows and carve out what deepens. Concrete, being new, had no inherited vocabulary at all, and the neighbouring Haus Duldeck was where that vocabulary had to be found. This is what he means by feeling for the material, and he treats it as a constraint on the artist rather than a licence.
The seven columns and their capitals carry the argument's centre. Each capital is generated from the one before it, in the way a plant's higher leaves are generated from its lower ones. Steiner is careful here, because the sevenfold sequence invites exactly the mystical reading he wants to refuse. He answers that the number is not imposed but arrived at: work the metamorphosis honestly and an eighth capital would only repeat the first at a higher turn, just as the octave repeats the prime. More interesting is the shape of the sequence. It does not run from simple to complicated. It rises to greatest complexity in the middle and then simplifies again, and the simplified end is the more perfect. He illustrates this from the eye, which is elaborate in the middle animal orders and comparatively plain in the human being, the complexity having been drawn inward rather than dropped.
The interior surfaces reverse their usual job. A wall normally shuts the world out; here the forms are meant to open the person inside toward the cosmos, and the same intention governs the ceilings and the windows. The window panes are single coloured glass, with the image scratched away by a diamond point, and Steiner insists they are not works of art at all until they are set in place and the sun comes through them, any more than a score is music while it sits on the desk. The painting of the small dome pushes furthest. Rather than drawing a figure and colouring it in, he wanted the figure to arise out of the relationships between colours, since red and blue are experiences before they are pigments, and a drawn horizon line is a kind of lie where a boundary between blue and green is the truth.
The second lecture then widens into history, and this is where the volume becomes something other than a building tour. Steiner traces sacred architecture back to the grave.
"For a certain cultural current, the tomb is the first building, the building of the human soul that has left the earthly."
Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 30 December 1921
The ancestor's tomb becomes the god's temple, and the melancholy of the one turns into the cheerfulness of the other; a Greek temple is the dwelling of its god, and empty of the god's image it means nothing. The Gothic cathedral does something else. Its forms do not conquer weight, they strive upward and support each other, and the building is not a god's house but a meeting place for a congregation, which is why an empty cathedral without prayer is incomplete. The Goetheanum is offered as the next member of that series. It is neither a dwelling for a god nor a hall for a congregation gathered under a god, but a place where a person meets the riddle of their own humanity and, on that basis, unites willingly with others. The old Apollonian instruction to know thyself is what the forms are meant to say, and Steiner's closing note is that community can now be built only out of people who have become individuals first.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Eight entries in the Thalira glossary draw on GA 289. Together they cover most of the volume's working ideas, and each can be read on its own before returning to the lectures.
- The Nutshell Principle of BuildingWhy the shell must be formed by the same forces that formed what it holds.
- The Metamorphosis of the Column CapitalsGoethe's plant metamorphosis carried over into carved architecture.
- Simplification at the Summit of EvolutionThe perfected form as the simplified one, not the most elaborate.
- Feeling for the MaterialWorking with convexity in stone, concavity in wood, and finding a form for concrete.
- Engraved Glass WindowsColoured panes cut with a diamond point, completed only by sunlight.
- Painting Out of the ColourLetting figure and form arise from colour relationships rather than from drawn line.
- The Spatial-MusicalThe passage of architecture from the geometric into the musical made visible in space.
- The Tomb as the First BuildingThe descent of temple and cathedral from the grave of the ancestor.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation of the two Dornach lectures by Peter Stewart alongside the German original. Search the Archive for GA 289 or for the title to reach the lecture pages and their table of contents.
A note on scope: the English material at the Archive covers two lectures from December 1921, while the German volume gathers a wider set of illustrated talks on the first Goetheanum. If you are working from the English alone, treat what follows the two Dornach lectures as still ahead of you.
For print editions and related titles in English, search SteinerBooks. Because the illustrations are half the argument here, an edition with the plates is worth seeking out; the lectures constantly point at things that were photographed and are now gone.
Continue Your Study
- Begin with the two entries that carry the volume's method rather than its details, The Nutshell Principle of Building and The Metamorphosis of the Column Capitals. Everything else in GA 289 follows from those two.
- Read the historical spine on its own by pairing The Tomb as the First Building with The Spatial-Musical, which together run from the ancestor's grave to an architecture that behaves like music.
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see where these terms connect with Steiner's work on Goethe, on the senses, and on the arts.
- Return to the GA Work Library for study guides to the neighbouring volumes, or follow a structured sequence through Paths to Knowledge.