Each Goetheanum capital was felt out of the one standing before it, so the series completes itself at the seventh instead of repeating a pattern.
The Metamorphosis of the Column Capitals in Anthroposophy is the sculptural law Rudolf Steiner used to shape the seven pairs of columns inside the first Goetheanum at Dornach, set out in his lectures of 28 and 30 December 1921, published as The Ideas Behind the Building of the Goetheanum (GA 289). Ordinary architecture makes a capital and copies it. Steiner refused the copy: each capital was felt out of the one standing before it, the way a leaf higher on a stem grows out of the simpler leaf below, which is Goethe's plant metamorphosis carried from botany into carved wood. Complication rises toward the middle of the row and then simplifies again, so the seventh capital closes the sequence and an eighth could only restate the first at a higher level. Read by convexity and concavity, the first answers the seventh, the second the sixth, the third the fifth, and the middle capital stands alone.
The Metamorphosis of the Column Capitals names the working method behind the interior of the first Goetheanum: fourteen carved columns, seven distinct capital forms, each one born from its predecessor rather than stamped from a template. Steiner treated the row as a growing organism in wood, and said the closure at seven came out of the carving itself, not out of a sacred number chosen in advance and then illustrated.
In Steiner's Own Words
But to interpret the seven columns here in any other way than in an artistic sense would contradict what was at the root of the original work when the model was being developed. If one proceeds by allowing the individual capitals to emerge from one another, that is, allowing each following one to emerge from the previous one, as I described last time, one comes to the conclusion that in a certain respect a kind of conclusion is reached with the seventh column. This simply corresponds to the successive feeling in the creation of the form. If one wanted to make an eighth column, one would have to repeat the form, albeit at a higher level.
What it Means Today
The clearest working continuation of this law stands not in Dornach but in Järna, south of Stockholm, where the Danish-born architect Erik Asmussen (1913 to 1998) built the Rudolf Steiner Seminariet campus from 1968 until the end of his life, including the Vidarkliniken hospital opened in 1985. Gary J. Coates set out the design principles of that campus in Erik Asmussen, Architect (Byggförlaget, Stockholm, 1997), and metamorphosis is listed there as a rule of the work rather than a decorative motif. A window head, a door surround, a roof profile: each is allowed to change from one building to the next along the site, so that anyone walking the campus reads a sequence rather than a repeated stamp. That is the capital law lifted out of a single hall and laid across a whole settlement.
It also explains why photographs of these buildings undersell them one at a time. The meaning sits in the interval between the forms, exactly as Steiner's seventh capital says nothing without the six that prepared it. Thalira synthesis: the capitals are better understood as a training instrument than as ornament, since a row that can only be read by walking it obliges the observer to supply the transitions, which is the same act of perception Goethean observation asks for when it follows one leaf into the next.
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