Steiner's name for architecture in which the geometric passes over into the musical, so that forms hold the relationships tones have to one another.
The Spatial-Musical in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for a building style in which the geometric and mathematical ordering of older architecture passes over into a musical ordering made visible, so that the forms of a room stand to one another as tones stand to one another in a phrase. Steiner named it at Dornach on 28 December 1921, in the first of the lectures gathered as The Ideas Behind the Building of the Goetheanum (GA 289), speaking about the seven carved columns, the architraves and the lectern of the first Goetheanum. The bearer is the human being's own musical sense, which reads interval and sequence in wood and concrete rather than in sound. Steiner attached a warning to it: a musical experience translated into calculated pitch ratios is a buried music, and what the formulae hold afterwards is its corpse. Its modern application runs through Hans Jenny's cymatic photography, which made tone visible as form on vibrating plates.
The Spatial-Musical is what Steiner called the moment when a building stops being measured and starts being heard. Walking the first Goetheanum, he said, the columns and architraves were not to be read as a diagram of proportions but felt as a sequence, each form answering the one before it the way a tone answers a tone.
In Steiner's Own Words
And again, if you take the columns as they are leaning here and think further about their form, if you combine them here: then the combination again becomes what stands here as a lectern. On the one hand, it leans towards the auditorium, on the other hand, it is a conclusion of what is present in the auditorium. The individual forms are conceived on this basis. However, the geometric-mathematical style of older forms is thereby transformed into a spatial-musical quality. But that, in turn, means something for human evolution, that the geometrical gradually passes over into the musical, so that the musical also confronts us in space.
What it Means Today
Forty-six years after that lecture, a Swiss physician working near Dornach published the closest thing anyone has made to a photograph of Steiner's claim. Hans Jenny set sand, iron filings, lycopodium powder and viscous fluids on steel plates and membranes driven by a crystal oscillator, then photographed what sound did to them. His two volumes, Kymatik (Cymatics), came from Basilius Presse in Basel in 1967 and 1972, and he built the word from the Greek kyma, wave. Raise the pitch and the figure on the plate reorganises itself: a lattice becomes a rosette, a rosette becomes a ring of nodes and troughs. Nothing has been added except tone, and space has answered in form.
Thalira synthesis: Jenny's plates and Steiner's columns are the two ends of one gesture, the first letting tone write itself into matter, the second letting a sculptor read that writing back, and both go dead at the same moment, when the observer reaches for the frequency number instead of the form.
For a practitioner the instruction is narrow and usable. Stand in a room and ask not what its proportions measure but what its sequence does: which form opens, which form answers, where the phrase comes to rest. Steiner shaped the first Goetheanum so that the question would have an answer.
Where to Read More
- The Ideas Behind the Building of the Goetheanum, GA 289
- Find Steiner's Goetheanum architecture lectures at SteinerBooks
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