Steiner's phrase for a temple interior that encloses completely yet is formed so the eye and the feeling pass straight through its walls into the cosmos.
To Have Walls and Not to Have Walls in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's coined paradox for the task he set the temple art of the future, spoken on 12 December 1911 in Berlin to the first General Assembly of the Johannesbau-Verein and printed in GA 252, The History of the Johannesbau and Goetheanum Associations. In German the phrase runs «Wände haben und keine Wände haben». Steiner asked for an inner space that is fully closed and yet shaped in every colour and every form so that its seclusion is not a seclusion: the eye, and the whole feeling life with it, is invited everywhere to penetrate the wall, so that one sits enclosed in the seclusion of the cell and is at the same moment connected with the weaving world-divine. It is the design brief that travelled from the unbuilt Munich Johannesbau to the first Goetheanum at Dornach, and it remains the working test for any room built to hold spiritual work.
To have walls and not to have walls is the formula Steiner gave when he was asked what the new building should actually do. A wall that only encloses breeds what he called the egoism of space. A wall that only opens, a window, breaks the enclosure. The temple art he wanted holds both: a boundary that stays a boundary and still lets the universe in.
In Steiner's Own Words
From what spiritual science can give us, we must find the possibility of creating that inner space which, in its colors and formal effects and in other artistic presentations it contains, is at once closed and at the same time in every detail such that the seclusion is not a seclusion, that it invites us everywhere we look to penetrate the walls with the eye, with the whole feeling and sensing, so that we are closed and at the same time in the seclusion of the cell we are connected to the All of the weaving world-divine. “To have walls and not to have walls”, that is what temple art of the future will answer: an inner space that denies itself, that no longer develops the egoism of space, that, in all the colors and forms it will offer, wants to be there only to let the universe in.
What it Means Today
The closest working answer outside Anthroposophy comes from James Turrell, the Quaker artist who has spent fifty years building rooms whose real subject is their own ceiling. In 1986 he installed Meeting at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York: a plain chamber with benches around the walls and a clean-edged aperture cut through the roof. There is no glass in it. The room is enclosed on every side, and the sky is simply present inside. Turrell later carried the device into a working house of worship, the Live Oak Friends Meeting House in Houston, Texas, where a retractable panel opens the ceiling over silent Quaker meeting. Sitters describe the doubled condition Steiner named: held inside a small room, and at the same time given to the whole sky.
Turrell reaches that condition by subtraction, removing a piece of the boundary and letting the aperture do the work. The Thalira synthesis is this: Steiner asked for the harder version, a wall that stays whole and turns transparent through what is worked into it, colour by colour and form by form, so the connection is carried by the boundary itself rather than by a hole cut in it. Turrell's aperture proves the experience is real and repeatable. Steiner's brief says the surface, not the opening, is where the work belongs. Anyone shaping a room for meditation or worship chooses between the two.
Where to Read More