Steiner's rule that a form must be found out of the substance it is worked in, never imposed on it from outside.
Feeling for the Material in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's requirement that an artistic form be found out of the substance it is worked in rather than imposed on that substance from a drawing or a thought. He set it out in the lecture of 28 December 1921 at Dornach, published in The Ideas Behind the Building of the Goetheanum (GA 289), while describing how the first Goetheanum was raised. The rule is worked, not theoretical: in stone the sculptor attends to the raised parts and brings the whole form out of its convexities; in wood the attention must travel into the hollows, and the form is carved out of its concavities; concrete asks for forms of its own again, unlike marble. Because the faculty in question is feeling rather than intellect, Steiner said he would sooner speak of the architectural feeling of Dornach than of its architectural idea.
Feeling for the material names the working sense a builder or sculptor develops for what a given substance will and will not do. Steiner treated it as the first condition of an honest style: wood is not stone, stone is not concrete, and each yields its form by a different route. The Goetheanum was his test case for the principle at building scale.
In Steiner's Own Words
When you form sculpturally and you form out of stone, you have to consider, for example, that which is raised in the form. When you work out of the stone, you have to work out the elevations, the convexities in particular. If you are shaping the eyes of a sculptural figure of a human being, and you have stone as your material, then direct your attention to the elevations, to the convexities, and work the whole eye out of the convexities. If you make a figure in wood, you cannot proceed in this way, then you must direct your attention everywhere to the depressions, to the concavities, and you must, as it were, carve out what is becoming deeper from the wood. This must be out of feeling. It must come from the feeling for the material.
What it Means Today
The clearest living continuation of this rule is the material-led architecture of Peter Zumthor, whose studio at Haldenstein in Graubünden lies up the Rhine from Dornach. At the Therme Vals, completed in 1996, Zumthor built the bath from some sixty thousand slabs of Valser quartzite cut in the same valley, letting the stone's bedding planes set the module, the joint, and the temper of the rooms. In Thinking Architecture, published by Lars Müller in 1998, he describes beginning a design not from an image but from the concrete presence of a material under the hand. Nothing in Zumthor's writing is anthroposophical and he makes no claim to Steiner, which is why the convergence is worth noting: two builders working seventy-five years apart on the same Swiss river arrived at the same refusal, that a form may not be drawn first and clothed in a material afterwards.
Thalira synthesis: what Steiner adds, and what a purely architectural reading of Zumthor leaves out, is that convexity and concavity are not two techniques but two directions of attention, one following the substance outward into the light and one following it inward into the dark, so carving wood trains a different organ in the carver than carving stone does.
The practical test is small: ask what the material is already doing, and let the next cut answer that rather than the sketch.
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