A Third Way In Architecture by Kenneth Bayes

A THIRD WAY IN ARCHITECTURE

By Kenneth Bayes

From the 1950 Edition of the Golden Blade

An Anthroposophical Journal

https://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/stories/Journal_Articles/GoldenBlade_1950.pdf

Rudolf Steiner’s legacy to architecture appears to be slight, and in architectural circles in this country his name is almost unknown. A few buildings designed by him at Dornach in Switzerland, photographs and a model of an earlier building that was destroyed by fire, a few lectures—this, on the face of it, is his contribution. The knowledge that it all belongs to a short period during and soon after the first World War, when Dr. Steiner was also very active in other fields, may increase our admiration for the worker but not necessarily for the work. We are left with the question whether the architectural quality of the work merits serious attention, whether the forms have anything of value to say to us.

The architect who begins to study Rudolf Steiner’s buildings finds that his two major works, the original Goetheanum and the present one which succeeded it, are similar apparently only in their purpose, in their main axial symmetry and in having forms which are strange. But in general appearance, how different are these two buildings! The first built largely of wood, warm and living: the second in stark, forbidding concrete; the first with its two interpenetrating domes, serene and friendly on the hilltop: the second with high, fortress-like walls.

Turning to the subsidiary buildings of this Dornach group, the houses and the workshops, we find them nearer sometimes to the first Goetheanum and sometimes to the second; and, interesting though these other buildings may be, the feeling remains that in the two Goetheanums is to be found, if anywhere, Steiner’s significance for architecture.

But to extract the significance from these two enigmatic buildings we must turn to Steiner’s teachings.

In his published lectures, Rudolf Steiner suggests a new interpretation of the architecture of history and indicates the basis for a new
style for to-day. This is not just another aesthetic, a new abstraction.

The new interpretation and the new style are deeply connected with Steiner’s insight into the nature of Man, and with his conception of the cosmos—and they can be properly understood only in relation to these.

Many will find it difficult to accept the idea that architecture has any connection with such questions. The abstract quality of human thinking during the last few centuries has led to the grouping of conceptions into isolated compartments. This specialisation has made possible the particular kind of knowledge with which we abound to-day, but has also deprived human beings of their wholeness.

There are two conceptions underlying Steiner’s work which are vital to this kind of understanding of architecture. The first is that man is essentially a spiritual being, both in origin and in destiny, who dwells for periods of time in a physical body on earth; the second is that human consciousness on earth goes through evolutionary changes in the course of time.

These are by no means generally accepted today. Natural science, quite rightly finding that the human body has evolved from simpler forms, assumes that this is the whole story—that evolution has taken no other course. Rudolf Steiner’s teaching is that there has been a spiritual evolution “downwards”—a gradual descent of the spirit into bodily incarnation—as well as an organic evolution “upwards”. Further, we find that from the time when human beings first appeared on earth, this descent of the spirit into closer union with its material vehicle has continued, and is reflected in the evolution of human consciousness.

Human consciousness has become sharper and clearer, acquiring an ability to perform feats of precise scientific calculation and technical invention which were impossible for it in earlier periods, but at the same time its range has narrowed; there has been both a sharpening and a shortening of focus. To put it briefly—in proportion as man has extended his knowledge of, and his power over, his earthly environment, he has suffered a contraction of his spiritual faculties.

At the beginning of history, man lived on earth with little aware ness of the nature of physical substance, but deeply connected with the spirit. Since then the balance has gradually changed: we have exact knowledge of physical substances, but we are—usually—asleep in the spirit. And now, in this age of power and fear, this “age of anxiety”, the hour has come for man to reawaken by conscious endeavour his spiritual faculties and to bring them under that conscious control which in earlier epochs they lacked. The need is for a marriage between spiritual intuition and the clear concepts of the intellect: this was the aim of Rudolf Steiner*s Anthroposophy, or spiritual science.

That, briefly sketched, is the background and pattern against which architecture must be considered if we are to understand it in relation to man himself. We have to see his evolution, not as a straightforward progression from the simple to the complex, from the primitive to the civilised, but as a gradual change in emphasis between the spiritual and the physical in his consciousness. It is impossible to giasp the significance of the various architectural styles except in relation to the particular stage of human consciousness characteristic of the period. Equally, it is impossible to understand modem architecture except against this background of evolution.

We can see in the geometry of each succeeding style the stages of man’s incarnation and the development of his individual ego from the group consciousness. One may say that the task of lie Egyptians was to leam to draw nearer to the earth, to bring the soul deeper into the body, and to enter into the significance of death. Thus in the Egyptian style, the first of the “historical” styles, the architecture is massive and heavy with earthly forces—the rock tombs were in the body of the earth itself. Of all shapes the square or cube is the most earthbound—the most solidly planted on earth—and the experience of this quality was necessary to the Egypt’s. But the initiates, who were also the leaders of the people, knew that men were not yet prepared for the full measure of inner experience arising from the completely visible square or cube. Thus the square appears in the pyramid, but where it is invisible—as the shape of the ground-plan which is expressed in elevation, not as a square, but as a triangle, with its apex to the heavens. Again, in the temples, with their massive walls and pylons, the shapes are rarely quite
rectangular, but are tapered—their converging lines on elevation eventually meeting in the heavens, on plan leading to the inner chamber
of the initiate who alone, through his more advanced development, can already experience the significance of the cubic shape of this inner sanctuary.

The keynote of Greek, times is balance. Life on earth is in harmony with life in the spirit. Man has come to terms with the earth, and can, for the first time, accept the rectangular form, although in the pediment of the temple we still find the triangle and in, for instance, the doorway of the Erechtheion, the tapering walls. But the Greeks had no need to enter the- temple; it was the dwelling place of the Gods. They performed their service to the earth on the land, and looked towards the temple-with the confident know ledge that the Gods were among them. The whole land was the church, with the temple as the altar. Thus the Greek temple was a sculptured unity to be experienced from without.

Not until the next period, the Roman, is man sufficiently incarnated in the material substance of the earth to be able to erect the cubic shape and enter into it—not only to enter into it but to pass through it. For the Roman triumphal arch was, as it were, cut through a massive cubic block, and in passing through it the Caesars expressed both their personal triumph and the advancing mastery of their people over the material world.

In early Christian architecture, for the first time the church was built for all men to enter. The Greek harmony and balance had gone; instead, under the influence of Imperial Rome there was the need to withdraw into a sanctuary away from worldly affairs. Every day life became segregated from worship, and the long struggle back to the spirit had begun. In the basilican church the Greek temple was turned inside out; the columns—upright man—are found inside the building, and architecture became “sculpture from within”. The walls enclosing the dwelling place of the God became the chancel for the altar.

In the Gothic cathedrals we see manifested a further stage of man’s return to the spirit. The architectural forms transcend the earthly; the cleavage between the outside world and the precincts of the cathedral becomes more marked. The very structure itself, with its flying buttresses and delicate tracery, seems to spurn the forces of gravity. The interior is dimly lit; the splendour streaming in through stained glass windows is like the radiance of heaven flowing down into the darkness and perils of life on earth.

Then the pointed arch and the spire of the Gothic gave way to the dome and the rectangle of the Renaissance, with the revival of the antique. It seems, perhaps, as though the Gothic impulse over-reached itself in its flight from the earth and was too impatient to return to the heavens, but the Renaissance turned back and plunged deeply, perhaps too deeply, into the experience of the physical.

This sketchy review of the historical styles has taken a form which must not be read as a plea for symbolism in architecture. To discern, after the event, how the development of man has been expressed in architecture is very different from suggesting that man has deliberately chosen one form rather than another in order to express his development. Looking back now, with an intelligence awake to the historic changes in consciousness, we can see why some forms have been right for one age and others for another age. If we still look back with the materialistic intelligence of the last century we shall explain the changing styles either by the climatic-geological-structural analysis of Sir Banister Fletcher, or according to some arbitrary aesthetic theory. But neither the rational analysis nor the personal aesthetic are fully convincing to the mature man of today, who looks for a new basis for architectural evaluation which will satisfy the deepest human needs.

Where do we stand today with regard to the development of man in relation to building forms? Let us return again to the significance of the cube. During the Renaissance period—and for want of a new impulse this holds good almost up to the present day—the cubic or rectangular shape was the main form of building; but it was adorned with Classic mouldings and orders which, although long since dead, retained the semblance of a connection with the Golden Age of harmony and balance. Then there came a time when man felt he had no more need of the support of the past and could stand alone on the earth, sustained by his own efforts and his own intelligence. The Orders and mouldings were seen as the dead ornament that they had become. They were stripped off—and what remained? The stark, unadorned cube—and the “modem
movement” in architecture was born.

The simple square which the Egyptians planted on the earth as the plan of the pyramid was now projected as a plain square on elevation, too. The massive, block-forms of Egypt found new birth, but this time as fully-fledged cubes without the tapering walls. The new movement flourished in its most , extreme form in Germany during the nineteen-twenties, but it had its roots in the latter half of the last century and it belonged to the whole of the West.

It was just at this time, towards the end of the nineteenth century, that man had reached a stage of consciousness on earth where he was cut off, to an extent that had never happened before, from a knowledge of the nature of the spiritual world—he began, indeed, to doubt its very existence. At the same time he was supremely confident that his knowledge of the stmctinre and behaviour of matter made him independent of his past heritage, both earthly and heavenly. It was at such a moment—and one feels-it could have been at no other—that the modem movement began: and it was in the earthbound, “cubist” form that it found its expression. Thus the modem movement in architecture, and by that is meant the negative impulse of rejection, the “when in doubt leave out” philosophy, belongs essentially to the close of the nineteenth century. It was an honest statement of man’s barren spiritual life.

What will be Ae sequel to this architectural purge? It will be an architecture which will attune itself to whatever the sequel may be to nineteenth-century materialism. It would seem that this is proving to be on the one hand a sinking into an even deeper materialism; on the other, a return to a knowledge of the spirit in freedom and full consciousness. Those who believe that only the latter path will save mankind and the earth from chaos must find and create a new architectural style which will express the spirit in a way that is right for this age, and thus also be a means whereby man can find the spirit.

Here particularly is there the danger of symbolism, mentioned earlier. It would be disastrous to try to express spiritual truths by means of particular architectural forms! But if such truths live within us, we shall, in creating, produce forms in which they will have being. They will not be forms which express the spirit symbolically, but forms which themselves contain “inner forces of growth.”

Two main streams can be discerned in contemporary architecture to-day: they will become increasingly separate as rime goes on.

One of these continues, although in a very modem guise, the trend that is fundamental to Rome and the Renaissance. It contains the impulse which thrusts man further into the grip of materialism at a time when he should be emerging from it. It is grounded in logic, and confines itself to “things that can be known.” It relies on new systems of construction for creating new shapes. Its basic form is still the cubic, but now often incongruously raised into the air on legs, denying its earth-bound nature. It glorifies the machine and delights in the “manifestations of the power and will” of the straight line and the right angle. It is succoured on “cold reason”.

Students of architecture will already recognise this impulse as the one whose spokesman and leader is Le Corbusier; the famous slogan of his earlier days, “the house is a machine for living in”, is still expressive of his attitude. The genius of Le Corbusier penetrates deeper than he himself sometimes realises. He says, for instance, of the nineteenth century, that it was “the most astonishing period of preparation known to history … we know that an era of creation is about to commence.” This indeed is true, but one feels that the spiritual impulse which entered earthly evolution at that time and which was the preparation for the twentieth centuiy, will depend on the man who has intelligence enriched with spiritual warmth, rather than on Le Corbusier’s man “who is intelipnt, cold and calm”, and thereby “has grown wings to himself.” This is the call to those who can accept no knowledge or experience beyond the boundaries of the intellect.

The other main stream continues the impulse of the Gothic, inasmuch as it is successful in expressing the spirit in its forms. It has the significant difference, however, that whereas the Gothic builders were able to create out of their direct experience of the spiritual world, this modern school draws its inspiration mainly from the manifestation of the spirit in nature. It expresses kinship with the earth by building horizontally, close to the ground “out of the ground into the light”—and using materials as much as possible in their natural state. It abhors the city. It is romantic; vehement in its missionary zeal—”the thrilling search for reality.” It rejects the domination of the machine, although using it where of value. It re-asserts the supremacy of free human beings, working in community towards a common purpose. It insists on the essential correlation of the arts with manual work.

Thus is developed the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and of the many followers whom he has inspired by the eloquence of his words, his rich personality, and his buildings.

These two figures, Le Corbusier in France and Wright in America, represent the two polarities of contemporary architecture. Their own architecture is not always an extreme example of their own outlook; there are architects, some of whom may not even acknowledge their debt to Wright or Le Corbusier, who are more fanatical exponents of the two creeds than are the teachers themselves. But the writings of both Wright and Le Corbusier have a forceful enthusiasm, and styles perfectly attuned to their particular messages, which unhesitatingly proclaim them masters of the two streams.

In the buildings of Le Corbusier, there is-a strong poetic element, but it is a poetry, not of human values, but of speed and power. One
can feel that the subtle intervention of a slight curve in a wall, or he dramatic contrast of a rough stone wall against the clean line of steel or concrete, are not given for themselves, but serve only to heighten the sense of the machine-precision of the building as a whole. The geometry which underlies all Le Corbusier’s work is the old Euclidean geometry which does not belong to this age. Le Corbusier introduces a kind of humanity into his designs by using a module which he has devised, based on the proportions of the human figure: but it is an arid humanism which can be found only in measurement.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture shows less license than his writings: his feeling for building materials imposes its own discipline. This is not to say that his buildings are staid and respectable; on the contrary they are versatile and exciting, but as Le Corbusier is controlled by logic and mathematics, Wright is kept in check by the qualities of his stone or wood or concrete, and by the nature of his site. Wright’s style, which is far more widespread in America than in Europe, uses to the fullest advantage the natural beauty of the site, and many of his houses are situated in positions that, even for America, have particularly dramatic surroundings—the desert, the mountains, the plains, the rushing stream—in the mood of which and from whose very essence Wright’s forms seem to grow.

What is Rudolf Steiner’s place in this picture? It would seem that he occupies a central position between the two poles, not in the sense of compromise, but in showing a way of architectural development which will satisfy the deepest needs of modem man without domination from either extreme. This will be increasingly evident as the two streams become more separate and defined. His is the way between the temptation to worship, and so fall a victim to, the machine, and the temptation to take refuge from modern civilisation in idyllic dreams and romantic illusions.

Steiner’s architecture is seen in the forms of the two Goetheanum buildings, which, though built from the same impulse, are entirely
different in form. From all practical points of view one might expect the buildings to be similar; they have the same purpose to fulfil, the same site from which to grow, the same climate to withstand. There is certainly the very important difference in the materials used, wood in one case and concrete in the other, and this naturally results in a different expression. But it is not a sufficient reason.

Perhaps we may draw near to an explanation if we see how, an addition to these practical considerations, Steiner created forms that were in accordance with the strivings and destiny, as he knew them, of the people who would use the buildings: a functionalism, as it were, at a deeper level than that to which the word is usually applied in architectural criticism.

In this sense, we may feel that the first Goetheanum was designed deliberately in a style which belongs to the future, and that its forms speak to us in a language which demands the effort of a conscious response such as we are now only beginning to find possible. It was both an inspiration and a challenge to the anthroposophical movement and to the world. But the destructive forces of the present overcame it. It was burnt down, almost certainly as the result of deliberate incendiarism, on New Year’s Night, 1922-3.

The second Goetheanum, in its material and form, was the reply to this onslaught, and also perhaps in some way to the terrible upheaval of the Great War which had intervened between the conceptions of the two buildings. In choosing concrete, the most inorganic, the most dead of all building materials, Steiner, one feels, is deliberately taking the living forms into that realm which is most hostile to them, is attacking the enemy in his own stronghold and at the same time making use of that stronghold for the preservation of forms which could not endure in the more living and vulnerable material of wood. The forms which he has used for this building belong also to the future, but to the more immediate future when the spirit must be able to withstand severe attacks from the materialistic world. Where the forms of the first Goetheanum are plant-like, those of the second have the enduring quality of rock (the enclosing shell protects the space which once held the more potent wood-form) and look out on the world with the strength and calm which, are born of knowledge.

By the side of every truth there appears a falsehood which bears the semblance of the truth, a shadow which gives the illusion of being a repetition of the substance. They “appear to be alike, but beware, and confuse them not”; there is an abyss between them. This applies equally to architectural truths as to any other and it is necessary to be ever watchful for this “ghostly lover”.

For instance, the plant and mineral forms in Steiner’s architecture must be distinguished from the nature forms of other styles. Here is no naturalistic copying such as permeated the Art Nouveau movement; here is no connection with forms born from sentiment or vague feelings. Nor is it a matter of incorporating within the architectural scheme carefully placed areas of planting, as in the contemporary cliche of the interpenetration of house and garden, where the division between the two is as indeterminate as possible. We may feel that all these impulses grow out of man’s need, in this age, to permeate architecture with the forces of nature; but they do not achieve it in an architectural way.

In his forms, on the other hand, Steiner attempts to explore organic creation itself. “Through devoted study of the organic, creative processes in Nature,” he said, “you may endeavour to reach the possibility of shaping such organic forms, and of shaping the whole into one organic form, without infringement of the dynamic laws of architecture.” The forces of nature” can be truly understood by man only if he comprehends—as Goethe first discerned —how they work through metamorphosis. If these forces, then, live strongly enough in us, we may create living forms which are themselves a metamorphosis of natural forms and are also architecturally true. This inner connection with nature is both more subtle and deeper than, say, a feeling for the contours of the earth or the use of natural materials, however desirable these may be in themselves.

With the aim of retaining a relationship with nature, when within a contemporary building, there is a widespread use of the glass wall.
This aim, in itself a good one, is achieved by a method which is a negation of architecture—by the attempt to eliminate the building altogether at this point, for even the glass in its framing is usually made as inconspicuous as possible. In the first Goetheanum, we feel that Steiner achieved the same effect, but by means of the architecture itself. The solid walls were so permeated with living form as to let free the spirit into the universe outside. “The walls in ordinary buildings are enclosing walls.” (Rudolf Steiner said this before the glass wall had made its appearance). No wall in Dornach is so thought of; the walls are formed in Dornach, so that they are in a sense artistically transparent, so that when one is inside the building one does not feel oneself closed in. Every wall opens itself, so to speak, through the artistic motifs, to the whole wide world, and one enters this building with the consciousness that one is not in a building but in the world; the walls are transparent.” These walls were no imitation of nature; they allowed no view of nature; but they were the essence of nature.

Side by side with this opening out towards nature, we find in contemporary architecture an intense feeling for the importance of space itself within a building, and for the aesthetic effect of the interplay of one space with another. The walls are important no longer as shapes in themselves but as a means of enclosing space; the building is conceived as a three-dimensional unity rather than as a series of two-dimensional surfaces. This is a big step forward, perhaps the most important that modem architecture has made from the Renaissance attitude. But still the planes which form the boundaries of space—the floor, walls and ceiling—have little sense of real relationship to each other because they are not themselves formed by the space which they enclose.

Frank Lloyd Wright approaches this conception of the unity of floor, walls, and ceiling, when he speaks of the need for modern architecture to become plastic in form. He says ±at the space within a building “can only be expressed and liberated by plasticity”, and that this plasticity must be found “not only in decoration and ornament but in the whole building.”

It is, however, necessary to go a step further, and to realise space as full of living forces from the cosmos which can, through creative man, actually mould the enclosing surfaces to their own living forms. Then will a truly plastic architecture arise, such as we already see in the two Goetheanum buildings and in some of the houses at Dornach.

Frank Lloyd Wright, with his ideal of an organic architecture, is a powerful force in the straggle against the old geometrical style which reappears in modem dress. The new dynamic style of Steiner’s ¹architecture, however, takes us further and deeper to such an extent
that we enter a new realm; but we may find a connection with Wright if we see it (to adapt Mr. Owen Barfleld’s phrase) as Romanticism
in architecture come of age.

¹ As both Steiner and Wright have called their style “organic”, I have here taken the liberty of calling Steiner’s architecture “dynamic” , as it
appears to me to complete the trilogy of “static, organic, and dynamic” as applied to Le Corbusier, Wright, and Steiner.

SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Rudolf Steiner: Ways to a New Style in Architectures The Architectural Conception of the Goetheanum; The Mission of Spiritual Science and of its Building in Dornach; Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom.

2, Frank Lloyd Wright: Autobiography; An Organic Architecture; When Democracy Builds; Genius and Mobocracy.

3. Le Corbusier The City of Tomorrow; Towards a New Architecture- When the Cathedrals were White’, The Home of Man

COLLECTION OF LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE BY RUDOLF STEINER
https://www.rsarchive.org/Architecture/

First Goetheanum (photograph)

First Goetheanum Floor Plan

Second Goetheanum (photograph)

Second Goetheanum Floor Plan

The Goetheanum

1922

Mission of Spiritual Science and of Its Building at Dornach, Switzerland

1916

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