Architecture

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The first Goetheanum as an example of spiritual architecture, built from 1913 - 1923 according to Rudolf Steiner's designs.

Architecture (from Greek: αρχη arché "beginning, origin, foundation, the first" and τεχνη techné "art, craft, handicraft" or τεκτόν téktón "carpenter, master builder") is, taken literally, the "first craft" or the "first art" in general. It is based on the feeling of space, which arises from the inner experience of the physical body. If one observes how the human being walks and stands, one arrives at the architectural forms. This usually leads to the development of a regional or supra-regional architectural style that is typical for the respective epoch and today increasingly also for a specific architect.

„As far as you study the human being in movement and standing, you get the form of architecture. A perfect building is nothing other than the perfect standing and walking of man. Every culture has conceived and represented this static and dynamic in man through its architecture in a different way. The Assyrian-Babylonian culture represented the proclamation of the Logos more through the leaning forward of man, the Greek culture through the quiet standing. One need only know the way in which man stands in the world in order to recognise all forms of construction in a lively way. Today, the building imagination is very limited. And yet the architectural style of today must be one that is born out of human self-awareness, that flows from "know thyself". This has been attempted at the Goetheanum.“ (Lit.:GA 217a, p. 112f)

„We become acquainted, so to speak, with the outermost part of our being, that which proceeds through the action of our etheric body on our physical body, in a spatial system of lines and forces. If we carry this spatial system of lines and forces, which is basically continually active in us, out into the world and arrange matter according to this system of forces, if we detach this system of forces from us and arrange matter according to it, then the art of building comes into being. And all architecture consists in detaching this system of forces from us and putting it out into space. So that we can say: If we mean here schematically the outermost limits of our physical body, then we push the inner lawfulness, which is impressed upon the physical body by the etheric body, outside of us, and thereby the art of building comes into being. - Everything that is present in the laws of building in the assemblage of matter is also to be found in the human body. The art of building, architecture, is the projection of the laws of the human body outside of us into space.

Now we know that for our observation the physical body is followed by the etheric body. If we turn our gaze back once more to any work of architecture, what can we say about this work of architecture? We can say that there, carried out into the space outside, is the relationship between vertical and horizontal forces and between forces that act on each other, as they otherwise do in the human physical body. That is carried out.“ (Lit.:GA 275, p. 43)

„What happens in the interaction between the inner soul and the actual physical instrument can, if the human being is receptive for receiving the harmonies in the spiritual world, penetrate the physical body at night in its forces - not in its substances - with the forces that one would like to call the spatial forces. Because man in our present culture is so alienated from the spiritual world, it is precisely these spatial forces that have little effect on him. Where the soul's interiority meets the densest part of the human body, the forces that are brought along must be very strong if they are to live out in the robust physical body. In the more delicate cultural epochs, the soul's inner feelings brought the soul's impulses with them and penetrated this physical body more easily, and then people felt that forces always pass through the physical space on all sides, that this physical space is by no means an indifferent empty spatiality, but is permeated by forces in all directions. There is a feeling for this distribution of forces in space; this is brought about by the conditions which have just been described. You must visualise this by means of an example.

Think of one of the painters who still belonged to great artistic times, where one still had a feeling for the forces acting in space. You could see such a painter painting a group of three angels in space. You stand in front of the picture and immediately have the sensation: These three angels cannot fall down; it is natural that they float, for they hold each other by the working forces of space, just as the spheres of the world hold each other by the forces of space. Those human beings who acquire this inner dynamism through that interaction between the soul's interiority and the physical body, for them the feeling is present: It must be so; the three angels hold themselves in space. You will find this especially in some older painters, less so in the newer ones. You may appreciate Böcklin as much as you like, but the figure hovering above the "Pietà" evokes in everyone the feeling that it must plop down at any moment; it does not hold itself in space.

All these forces that go back and forth in space, which a human being really feels in space, are realities, and from this feeling of space all architecture arises. Genuine, true architecture arises from nothing other than the laying of stones or bricks in the lines which must already be there in space, doing nothing at all but making visible that which is already ideally, spiritually distributed in space by stuffing matter into it. This sense of space was purest in the Greek architect who, in his temple, represented in all its forms what lives in space, what can be felt in space. The simple relationship: that the column carries - and it carries either the horizontal or the oblique line bodies - is a reproduction of spiritual forces within the space. And the whole Greek temple is nothing other than a filling with matter of that which lives within space. Therefore, the Greek temple is the purest architectural thought, crystallised space. And as strange as this may seem to modern man, the Greek temple, because it is a physical corporeality composed of thoughts, is the opportunity for those figures which the Greeks knew as their gods to truly touch with their etheric bodies the lines of space with which they were familiar and to dwell in them. It is more than a mere phrase when it is said that the Greek temple is a dwelling house of the god. The Greek temple has a peculiarity for one who has a real feeling for such things, it has the peculiarity that one can imagine: Far and wide there would be no one to occupy it, nor would there be anyone inside. The Greek temple needs no one to look at it, no one to enter it. Think of the Greek temple standing alone, and far and wide there is no human being. Then it is what it should be most intensely. Then it is the inn of the God who is to dwell in it, because in the forms the God can dwell. Only in this way can one truly understand Greek architecture, the purest architecture in the world.

The Egyptian architecture, for example in the pyramid, is something quite different. We can only touch these things now. The spatial relationships, the spatial lines, are arranged in such a way that their relationships and forms show the soul the way to the spiritual worlds. From the paths which the soul takes from the physical world into the spiritual world, we have given the forms which express themselves in the Egyptian pyramid. And so in every kind of architecture we have the thought that is only comprehensible from spirituality.

In Romanesque architecture, which has the round arch, which, for example, has arranged church buildings in such a way that we have a nave and aisles, but then also a transept and an apse, so that the whole has the shape of a cross and the dome at the top, we have the idea of space grown out of the tomb. You cannot think of the Romanesque building in the same way as the Greek temple. The Greek temple is the dwelling house of the god. The Romanesque building cannot be thought of in any other way than as a burial place. The crypt belongs to it; not that people in their immediate lives do not stand in it; but it belongs to it that it is a place that draws together all the feelings that relate to the preservation and protection of the dead.

In the Gothic building you have something else again. As true as it is that the Greek temple can be thought far and wide without a soul: it is nevertheless populated, because it is the dwelling-house of the god, so true is the Gothic cathedral, which closes with the pointed arches at the top, not to be thought without the believing multitude that is inside. It is nothing complete. If it stands alone, it is not the whole. The people inside belong to it with their folded hands, just as folded as the pointed arches. Only then is the whole there, when the rooms are filled with the feelings of the devout believers. These are the forces that become effective in us, which are felt in the physical body as a feeling of being in the space. The true artist thus feels the space and designs it architecturally.“ (Lit.:GA 102, p. 218)

Indeed, the art of building is of outstanding importance for the development of the human being. By building, by elevating nature to the art of building, man is at the same time working on his own being in a deeply incisive way. The importance of architecture thus goes far beyond creating a pleasant and appealing shelter for man against the rigours of nature. In ancient times, people were very clearly aware of this and all ancient architecture therefore had a decidedly sacred character.

When people see the architectural forms and live with them every day, they have a transforming effect on their mind, and the mind in turn has a formative effect on the physiognomy, on the face of the human being in a later earthly life. In ancient times, the initiates often influenced the human soul and the physical form in order to make the human body a suitable instrument for the human spirit. This is how, for example, the spiritual effects of Gothic architectural forms can be seen in Central European mysticism.

Rudolf Steiner goes on to say:

„Let us characterise what the Egyptian felt. He said to himself: I see the corpse lying here, the dust of the human being who was the bearer of an I; I know, because I know it from ancient tradition, I know it from the experiences of my ancestors, that something remains there which goes into other worlds. It would not fulfil its task, said the ancient Egyptian, if it lived solely in that spiritual world; a bond of attraction must be woven between the world of the spiritual and the world of the earthly, physical. We must have, as it were, a magnetic bond for the soul which, in death, moves into higher regions, in order to excite in it a permanent feeling, so that it may return and appear again on this earth. We know today from spiritual science that humanity itself ensures that the soul returns again and again to new and new incarnations; we know that man, when he passes in death into other spheres, in the time of Kamaloka, in the time when he gets out of the habit of earthly things, is bound by certain forces to the physical. We know that it is these forces which do not allow him to ascend immediately into the regions of Devachan, that it is also they which draw him down again into a new incarnation. But today we are people who live in abstractions that represent such things as theory. In ancient Egypt this lived as a tradition; the Egyptian was the opposite of a theorist, a mere thinker, he wanted to see with his senses how the soul makes its way out of the dead body into the higher regions. He wanted to have this built up in front of him, and he built up this thought in the pyramid: the way in which the soul ascends, how it emerges from the body, how it is still partially bound and how it is led up into higher regions. In the architecture of the pyramid we can see the soul's bondage to the earthly, like an image of Kamaloka it confronts us with its mysterious forms, we can say that in the outer view it is an image of the soul abandoned by the body and moving into higher regions...

And again we move forward in our contemplation. We advance from the Egyptian pyramid to the Greek temple. Such a temple can only be understood by those who have a feeling for the powers that are at work in space. The Greeks had such a sense of space. The person who studies space from the standpoint of spiritual science knows that this space is not the abstract emptiness of which our ordinary mathematicians and physicists dream, but that it is rather very differentiated. It is something that is in itself filled with lines, lines of force here, there, from top to bottom, from right to left, straight, round lines in all directions. One can feel the space, penetrate it emotionally. Whoever has such a sense of space knows why certain old painters painted the free-floating angelic figures in Madonna pictures so wonderfully true to nature; he knows that these angels hold each other, just as the bodies of the world hold each other in space by their force of attraction. It is quite different when you look at Böcklin's painting "Pieta", for example. There is no objection to the other excellence of this picture, but those who have retained a lively sense of space have the sensation that these strange angelic figures are about to fall down at any moment. The old painters still had the feeling for space from their earlier clairvoyance; in more recent times this has been lost.

When art still had occult traditions, one knew of such mutually supporting forces that are within the space, that flow back and forth there. Such forces were felt by those in whose spirit the idea of the Greek temple originated. They did not think it out, but they perceived the forces that flowed through the space and added the rock material: what was already there occultly, they filled with matter. Thus the Greek temple is a material outworking of forces working in space; a Greek temple is a crystallised thought of space, in the purest sense of the word. The consequence of this is something very important. Because the Greek gave material form to the spatial forces, he gave the divine-spiritual entities the opportunity to use this material form. It is not a figure of speech, but a reality, that in those days the God descended into the Greek temple in order to be among men on the physical plane. Just as today a parent provides the physical form, the flesh of the child, so that the spiritual can live out its life on the physical plane, something similar happened in the Greek temple. There the opportunity was given for divine-spiritual entities to flow down and embody themselves in the architectural construction of the temple. That is the secret of the Greek temple: the God was there in the temple. Whoever felt the Greek temple form correctly also felt that far and wide no human being needed to be there, nor in the temple itself, and that the temple was not empty after all, for the God was really present in the temple. The Greek temple is a whole in itself, because it contains the forms that banish the God into it.

And if we now look at the Roman church building, preferably the one with a crypt, we already see a kind of further development. In the pyramid we see the path that the soul takes after death, the outer architectural form for the escaping soul. The Greek temple is the expression for the divine soul that likes to stay on the physical plane. The Roman building with the crypt corresponds to the cross on which the dead body of Jesus hangs. Humanity has advanced to a heightened consciousness in spiritual spheres. The bondage to the earthly, the Kamaloka time is represented in the pyramid; the victory over the physical form, the victory over death is expressed in the cross on which the dead Jesus hangs and which is to remind us of the spiritual victory over death, of Christ. And again a little further on we come to the Gothic building. It is not complete without the believing community inside. If we want to feel everything together, then the folded hands must unite with the pointed arches and the feelings that are expressed in them, that flow upwards. But not feelings like those in the crypt, where the memory of the spiritual victory over death was celebrated, but victorious feelings, like those felt by the soul, which already feels victorious over death in the body. The soul, victorious in the body, belongs in the Gothic building; it is not complete if such feelings do not flow through it. The Greek temple is the body of the god, it stands alone. The Gothic church presents itself as something that calls the congregation; it is not a temple, but a cathedral. Dom is the same word that is expressed in the suffix "tum", as for example in the word Menschentum or Volkstum. The Russian word Duma is also based on the word "tum". A cathedral, a "tum" is where individual members are called together to form a congregation.“ (Lit.:GA 105, p. 26f)

With the first and second Goetheanum and other architectural designs, Rudolf Steiner gave significant impulses for a forward-looking spiritual architecture.

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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