Rudolf Steiner's double-domed wooden building at Dornach (1913 to 1922), the first home of anthroposophy and the founding work of organic architecture, destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922.
The First Goetheanum was the original wooden building Rudolf Steiner raised on a hill at Dornach, near Basel, to house the Anthroposophical Society and its performances of eurythmy and the Mystery Plays. Two interpenetrating domes of unequal size rested on a carved concrete base, and the whole structure was conceived as a living form rather than a static shell. Fire consumed it on the last night of 1922.
In Steiner's Own Words
After what I have now told you about the twofold meaning of the circle you will be able to realise that when you enter the building from the West and feel yourselves surrounded by the circular structure, by the cupola above, that here is the image of the human self. But the other smaller space in the East is not at first sight so intelligible. The smaller structure will seem to be full of mystery because, although its form is also circular, it must be conceived of as the result of a process of division and it only outwardly resembles the larger space. There are two circles, but the one corresponds to the life of everyday and the other is connected with the whole cosmos. We bear within us a lower self and a higher self. Both again are one. Thus our building had to be a twofold structure.
What it Means Today
The First Goetheanum is the founding monument of what later writers named organic architecture: building that grows by metamorphosis instead of repeating the right angle. Steiner worked without a fixed blueprint, modelling the forms in plasticine and letting carpenters cut the curving oak and elm by hand, so the two domes met in a way no compass could have plotted. Around the great hall stood seven columns whose carved capitals changed motif from one to the next, the sculpture and the architecture refusing to stay separate trades. Overhead, painters worked colour directly into the plaster of the cupolas, so that wall, carving, and glass spoke one continuous language.
The building stood only briefly. After an arson fire destroyed it on New Year's Eve of 1922, Steiner answered with the concrete Second Goetheanum, the first large sculptural building cast entirely in reinforced concrete, completed in 1928 and still standing at Dornach as the headquarters of the General Anthroposophical Society. The wooden original survives in photographs, in the salvaged Representative of Humanity sculpture, and in a lineage of architects, Imre Makovecz in Hungary and the studios around the Goetheanum among them, who still design from the conviction Steiner set down in 1914: that a building need not enclose a room but can become, in his phrase, an organ through which the spirit speaks.
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