Rudolf Steiner's Theories and Their Translation Into Architecture

Rudolf Steiner’s Theories and Their Translation into Architecture by Fiona Gray B.A. Arts (Arch.); B. ARCH. (Deakin). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University Submitted for examination January, 2014. Acknowledgements There are many people to whom I am greatly indebted for the support they have given me throughout this thesis. First among them are my supervisors. Without the encouragement I received from Dr. Mirjana Lozanovska I may never have embarked upon this journey. Her candour and insightful criticism have been immensely valuable and her intelligent engagement with the world of architecture has been a source of inspiration. Associate Professor Ursula de Jong has also made a very substantial contribution. Her astute reading and generous feedback have helped bring clarity and discipline to my thinking and writing. She has been a passionate advocate of my work and a wonderful mentor. Special thanks also to Professor Des Smith, Professor Judith Trimble and Guenter Lehmann for their ongoing interest in my work and the erudition and wisdom they graciously imparted at various stages along the way. My research has also been greatly assisted by a number of people at Deakin University. Thank you to the friendly and helpful library staff, especially those who went to great lengths to source obscure texts tucked away in libraries in all corners of the world. Thanks also to the Research Services Division, particularly Professor Roger Horn for the informative research seminars and much needed writing retreats he facilitated. My ambition to undertake this PhD was made possible by the financial support I received from a Deakin University Science and Technology scholarship. It afforded me the precious gift of time by allowing me to afford quality childcare. While I worked I was able to feel secure in the knowledge that my children were receiving the warm affection and undivided attention of their friend and teacher, Heather Weiss. Further financial assistance was also provided by the Deakin University Neil Archbold Travel Award. This award allowed me to undertake field research at the Goetheanum and Rudolf Steiner Archives in Dornach, Switzerland. During my stay there I was overwhelmed by the warm hospitality I was shown and the assistance I received from Professor Walter Kugler, Dino Wendtland, Kurt Remond, Dr. Roland Halfen, Susanne Böttge, Luigi Fuimara and Peter Braithwaite. It was also my very great honour to meet architect and author, Werner Blaser, whose passion and intellect made an indelible impression on me. iii Along the way I have been helped enormously by my German teacher, Martina Sherwin. She made the challenging task of learning a new language an enjoyable one. Her patience during the many hours we spent translating difficult texts together was greatly appreciated. I extend my heartfelt thanks to Tiff, Jo, and Steph for the sustenance their friendship gives. Thank you to my loving and devoted parents, Carmel and Ray Smith, for all that they are and all that they do. Their generosity and belief in me is unwavering and they can only begin to know how much their practical and emotional support means to me. To my husband Damien, I owe such enormous gratitude. Throughout this thesis he has bestowed upon me an abundance of love, humour, encouragement and perspective, which I surely could not have done without. Thank you always. And finally, to my beautiful children, Joel and Georgia, who are by far my greatest teachers. You are my heart, my home, my happiness, and I adore you. iv Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century, Europe’s bourgeoisie, alongside many of its artistic and intellectual elite, were enthusiastically embracing a myriad of esoteric doctrines and mystical impulses. One of the most prominent and enduring examples of this cultural phenomenon is to be found in Rudolf Steiner’s quasi-philosophical system of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy postulates the existence of an objective spiritual world that is accessible to direct human experience through the training of intellectual cognitive faculties. Steiner applied Anthroposophy as a conceptual scaffold to a wide range of practical and creative endeavours including architecture. Unlike his philosophical enquiries, exemplified by his comprehensive work on Goethe, Steiner never presented his architectural ideas in a systematic or methodical way. As a result, much of the critique of his architectural work tends to focus on the stylistic aspects of his buildings with limited recognition or understanding of the philosophical foundations from which they arose. In contrast, Anthroposophically inspired studies of his architecture have tended to be biased in their critique or have failed to appreciate the disciplinary complexities of architecture. These works often assume the reader’s knowledge, and unquestioning acceptance of occult concepts, and hence, are difficult to relate to the broader current of architectural discourse. Neither approach is wholly satisfactory since Steiner’s architecture and its conceptual basis are interdependent. This thesis seeks to redress this problem by reconsidering Steiner’s theories in non-esoteric terms in order to better understand what they could mean for architecture. This is achieved by selecting key tenets of Steiner’s philosophy and using them as a framework to analyse and interpret how he translated his theory into the practice of architecture. Five concepts structure this examination—polarity, metamorphosis, the cognitive faculties of imagination, inspiration and intuition, the senses, and anthropomorphism. An investigation into the ways in which each of these ideas manifests itself in built form helps to draw out the complexity and uniqueness of Steiner’s work. This supports a new reading of his architecture that moves beyond the problem of stylistic classification in order to probe more deeply into the possibilities that his philosophical ideas may offer. It provides the basis for a reassessment of the significance of Steiner’s contribution to the history and theory of modern architecture. v Preface This thesis began from a search for meaning in architecture arising from the development of a client brief for the design of new classrooms, performance auditorium, and outdoor kitchen for a small rural Steiner School in Freshwater Creek, Victoria, Australia. My client was the school council, made up of a group of dedicated parents who shared a commitment to educating their children using the pedagogical principles established by Rudolf Steiner in 1919. Although they were an intelligent and enthusiastic client, it became apparent during the initial stages of establishing the client brief that they were unsure about what the architecture should say or do beyond responding to basic functional requirements. While they were deeply concerned that the architecture their children were to spend their days in should be meaningful and reflect the underlying philosophy of a Steiner school, their understanding of that philosophy and its inherent meaning was surprisingly unclear. Some parents were well versed in Steiner’s theories on education but were not familiar with his broader philosophical work and had no knowledge whatsoever of his architectural endeavours. Yet despite the fact that they were not able to articulate the philosophy, they did have a strong sense of what the building should look like. These ideas and images were generally borrowed from other Steiner schools even though they did not necessarily share any similarities in terms of the local environment, unique attributes or specific needs of their own school. The architecture of a large school set deep in a valley amongst thick, wet vegetation, for example, was considered equally appropriate for their school which was a fraction of the size and set on a flat, dry rural site. This begged the question whether the client actually wanted the design to be generated from a philosophical or stylistic foundation, or indeed, whether any real thought had been given to this aspect of the brief. In my role as architect I attempted to clarify the client brief by undertaking some preliminary research in the hope of arriving at a greater understanding of both Steiner’s architecture and its philosophical foundation. This investigation quickly revealed that Steiner’s architectural writings were invested with meaning specific to his own system of Anthroposophy. To understand that meaning required a solid grounding in Steiner’s entire worldview. Turning to his architecture proved just as vi problematic given that his two most significant buildings, the First and Second Goetheanums were strikingly different in their aesthetic expression, thereby indicating that a study of the architecture’s formal character alone was going to be severely inadequate in terms of arriving at any genuine understanding that might meaningfully inform the client brief. Thus, my initial enquiry led to a host of questions far beyond the scope of the original project. Does one need to be a practicing Anthroposophist to fully grasp Steiner’s theories and hence appreciate their meaning and implications for architecture? Can a philosophical system such as Anthroposophy inspire meaningful architecture or does it result in a formulaic architectural style? Can a philosophy developed at the turn of the twentieth century still have anything meaningful to offer contemporary architects? So deeply consumed did I become by these questions that it became a project in its own

Load more