In Steiner's account of how architecture began, the first building is the grave raised over an ancestor, an enclosure made for the soul that has left the earth.
The Tomb as the First Building in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of the origin of architecture: building begins not with shelter but with the grave raised over an ancestor. He set it out in the second of his Goetheanum slide lectures, given at Dornach on 30 December 1921 and printed in GA 289, The Ideas Behind the Building of the Goetheanum. In primeval times, Steiner said, those who looked toward the immortal in the human soul looked back to their forefathers, and the ancestral grave stayed a sacred place because it enclosed something spiritual. The built form was an envelope for a soul that had gone out of the earthly, so it carried the mood of mourning. As the worshipped ancestor became a god, the tomb widened into the Greek temple of Apollo, Zeus, or Athena, and the sorrow of the sepulchre rose into temple cheerfulness while column and beam still mastered the weight of the earth.
The tomb as the first building is Steiner's answer to a question architects seldom ask aloud: what was built first, and for whom. His answer sets the grave before the house and before the fortress. Building starts as an act of remembrance, a covering made for someone who has departed, and the Greek temple that follows keeps the shape and the gravity of that first covering.
In Steiner's Own Words
For a certain cultural current, the tomb is the first building, the building of the human soul that has left the earthly. In the construction of the Greek temple, one still feels something of an echo of the construction of the tomb. And the melancholy building of the tomb has risen in a joyful way in the building of the Greek temple, in that the departed human soul, which was once divinely worshipped as the ancestral soul, has become the god. The building over the ancestral grave, where the soul, the divinely worshipped ancestral soul was to be given a resting place, became the temple of the god Apollo, Zeus, Athena. And the temple enclosure became the extension of that which once existed as an ancestral tomb. As the ancestral soul became the god, so the tomb became the Greek temple.
What it Means Today
Modern architectural theory arrived at the same doorway from the opposite side. Adolf Loos, in his 1910 essay Architektur, written eleven years before this Dornach lecture, asked which part of building is art at all and answered that almost none of it is: only the tomb and the monument. Come upon a mound in the forest, six feet long and three feet wide, heaped by a spade, and something in you goes quiet and says that someone lies buried here. That, said Loos, is architecture. He was arguing against ornament and for use, and by aesthetic reasoning alone he reached the historical claim Steiner makes here: the form raised over the dead, the one form nobody lives in, is where building begins to speak.
Thalira synthesis: Loos found the tomb at the top of architecture, the single place where building becomes art, while Steiner found it at the root, the seed from which the temple of Apollo and every later sacred enclosure grew, and the two readings meet in one fact: a grave is the first structure a person builds for someone who is no longer there to use it. That is a usable test when you stand in any built space. Ask what the form is carrying rather than what it houses. Steiner's Greek temple carries gravity in column and beam because it began as a lid over the earth; the Gothic cathedral, by his reading, stopped carrying and started striving. Cemetery conservation officers handle the oldest continuous building type there is, which is why a barrow or a mausoleum is assessed as architecture and not as ground.
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