Architecture and Theosophy. KPC De Bazel and JLM Lauweriks

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Architecture and Theosophy. KPC de Bazel and JLM Lauweriks

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Recommended Citation Henderson, Susan R., "Architecture and Theosophy. KPC de Bazel and JLM Lauweriks" (1999). Full list of publications from School of Architecture. 231. https://surface.syr.edu/arc/231

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Susan R. Henderson Syracuse University

I hope that I will not risk paradox if I now accuse has sparked new studies, notably the 1995 exhibition at the Bauhaus masters—not of an excessive rational- the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt called Okkultismus und ism—but rather of not stating the religious, or 5 quasi-religious postulates for what they were doing; Avantgarde Von Munch bis Mondrian, 1900-1915. This or at any rate of not stating them explicitly. Only issue of Architronic is devoted to one aspect of this Itten and Klee have a clean record in this respect: history, the relationship between Theosophy and architec- and they were the two Bauhaus masters who ture from the turn of the century through the 1930s.6 realised most clearly the danger of van Doesburg’s excessive devotion to modernity; to interpreting While each essay touches on a different aspect of this every technological advance as a spiritual leap for- history, the overall intention is to indicate why Theosophy ward. rang such a strong chord among the architects of the period. Indeed, the striking thing about Theosophy is how 1 Joseph Rykwert seamlessly an esoteric belief system based in the study of spiritual phenomena intersected with both expressionistic and Neues Bauen ideas. Ultimately, this influence As Rykwert observed in 1968, a strong current of occult extended beyond the work of Theosophists through the and mystical thought, Gustav Pehnt’s “non-religious reli- embrace of esoteric ideas by a broader cohort of contem- giousness,” permeated much of modernist discourse at the porary architects: witness the interest of Peter Behrens turn of the century.2 The Expressionists, with whom we and H.P. Berlage in Theosophically based, geometrical generally associate such esoteric predelictions, produced analyses, studies each employed when devising a system- works ranging from the crystalline utopias of Taut and atic method of design.7 Scheerbart, to the exotic practices of Johannes Itten in theVorkurs of the Bauhaus, to dark, racial and nationalist theories reflected in the works of Bernhard Hoetger.3 Esotericism also formed a strain within the ranks of the Along with my co-authors avant garde. Malevich, Mondrian, van Doesburg, and El Lissitzky were some of those who found the key to an I would like to dedicate this issue of Architronic to the memory of Werner Seligmann alternative modernity in esoteric thought.4 Their mani- festos and declarations, colored by the pursuit of the non- who died this past fall. objective world, proclaimed the arrival of Vorticism, While Professor Seligmann will be Suprematism, Neo-Plasticism, Futurism and remembered as a spirited partisan Elementarism in turn. In the ethereal abstractions of of the modern movement, Proun, or the absolutism of De Stijl one discovers the his engagement with its history search for nameless essences as much as the reflection of went beyond the doctrinaire and scientific truths. This strain reverberated throughout the admitted the many contradictions and modern period. In architecture, it was echoed in the mys- diverse strains that ultimately comprised tique of geometry as espoused first by Berlage and the modern. For my own part, I benefited Behrens, then by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe as from the interest and support of a colleague they sought to elevate their architectural philosophies who generously shared his interest beyond rank functionalism through the validating exposi- tory power of esoteric ideas. in the work of Lauweriks and Berlage. He will be sorely missed. The growing interest in this aspect of early modernism V7n2: Introduction, Page 2

Theosophy offered the consolation of faith within the The chronicle of the Theosophical Society generally framework of a positivistic optimism. It proved to be a begins in September 1875 when a freemason named potent formula. George Felt read his paper, “The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians,” at the New York salon of By moving beyond the constraints of history and posi- the Russian émigrée and seer, Madame H. P. Blavatsky.8 tivism Theosophy also offered an alternative to the lived In the course of the evening, Blavatsky’s colleague, the experience of modernity. While this was achieved via a American Colonel Henry S. Olcott, asked if it would not retreat of sorts, it nevertheless constituted a rejection of be a good idea to form a society to pursue such studies the dominat forms of middle class culture and power, and further. Olcott proposed they found a society that would thus contributed to the modernist framework within which “diffuse information concerning those secret laws of both radically regressive and progressive departures soon Nature which were so familiar to the Chaldeans and emerged. Egyptians, but are totally unknown by our modern world The Netherlands was home to a particularly active chapter of science.” This often-recounted incident indicates the of the Theosophical Society. From the 1890s through the two facets that made Theosophy of interest to so many 1920s, its membership included a number of important artists. First, it offered a way of being and understanding artists and designers. Two key figures were the architects invulnerable to an increasingly secular world; second, it K.P.C. de Bazel and J.L.M. Lauweriks. Both have a renewed an ideal of beauty vested in forces beyond the rather vague presence in most architectural canons. De mundane, in a sacred ideal of Nature. Bazel had an influential career as an architect, but his work was hampered by chronic illness. His partner In one of her more concise explanations, Blavatsky Lauweriks assumed a more active role as teacher and the- defined Theosophy as the search for “the anciently uni- orist as de Bazel’s health declined. The two influenced a versal Wisdom-Religion.” Her fundamental proposition surprising array of architects in the years just preceding was that all living beings share in one larger reality, a the First World War. In the opening article, I write about reality that is purposeful and ordered. It was a conceptu- their work with reference to debates in Amersterdam, and alization that enabled her to accommodate the world’s Lauweriks's importance as a teacher at the Düsseldorf myriad belief systems within a single universalistic ideal. Academy and as an architect at Hagen in the Ruhr Valley. Theosophy reached beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition to find spiritual solace in religions as yet untouched by The next two articles articulate the divergent paths that modernity. The embrace of a bewildering and often con- Theosphical endeavor established in the 1920s. After the tradictory array of sacred traditions reflected Blavatsky’s revolutionary moment had passed, the split within the belief that each derived its validity from belonging to one modern movement between social reform and and artistic central and greater Truth. Much of Theosophy’s appeal individualism effected the work of the Theosophists. By lay in this inclusive principle: it reconciled East and this time Theosophical undertakings had settled into a West and readmitted the relevancy of spirituality and the more domestic phase. Adherents employed their philoso- irrational to modern life. phy as an ideal within an existing construct, less con- cerned perhaps with defining eternal truth as facilitating Theosophy brought these diverse creeds into accord at the its perception. Theosophists might interpret Social time of a church weakened by the explanatory power of Democracy, for example, as the societal expression of the science. Under Blavatsky’s tutelage Theosophy absorbed principle of ”unity in being.” The Society’s work had scientific knowledge by consecrating it to the larger pur- already earned Theosophists a reputation as humanists suit of esoteric study.9 For her the great enemy was and environmental advocates. In Ken Lambla’s piece we Darwin. By the dawn of the new century the danger see these communal and quotidian concerns reflected in came from the invasive reach of technology and rational- the work of Michiel Brinkman at the Spangen housing ization into the province of everyday life with a subse- settlement, Justus van Effenstraat, as Brinkmann attempt- quent diminution of custom, religion and experience as ed a Theosophical expression of the reform ideal. valid sources of knowledge.10 In turning the tables and “using” science in its recuperation of the spiritual, In contrast, Graham Livesey pursues the tendency of V7n2: Introduction, Page 3

Theosophy towards contemplative abstraction in his arti- ers as a spiritualist, and that those who attended her salon cle on the house built by L.C.van der Vlugt for the represented an array of New York society fascinated with important architectural patron C.H. van der Leeuw. the occult. Madame Blavatsky was as much the occasion While both essays deal with architects whose work we for, as the hostess of the salon: her guests looked forward think of as exemplifying the early modern period, each to the séances that often ended the evenings, when demonstrates how thoroughly different facets of mod- Blavatsky produced “phenomena” usually consisting of ernism evolved under the philosophical aegis of strange sounds and rappings. Only months before the Theosophy. At the same time, the two articles chronicle September salon, she and Olcott began receiving precipi- the move away from the explicitly immanental content of tated letters—letters produced by automatic writing— the work of the formative years of modernism—as in the from the “Grand Master of the Egyptian Brotherhood of work of Lauweriks—towards a more general expression Luxor” who proposed to take them on as pupils through of Theosophical ideals. his correspondences from the other side. At the salon, the interest in forming a society was generated, not by Felt’s Last, in a contribution by Alfred Willis, we are introduced proportion study, but by the suggestion that the mathe- to the American headquarters of the Theosophical Society, matical system that generated it might also be magical, a utopian community called Krotona, built in the and serve as a means to conjure the spirit world.11 Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles in the early twentieth Theosophy then has a history often associated with char- century. The construction of Krotona falls between the latanism and the medicine show, a discomfiting factor that work of Lauweriks and the Dutch modernists. Yet it likely serves to explain its relative neglect in the history exemplifies a naturalism that typifies Europe in the of art. It was the shock of associating esotericism with 1890s. Still drawing on historicist models and natural the modern masters that produced the controversy result- metaphors, this architecture is more explicitly symbolic ing from Rykwert’s first reading of his essay on the “Dark and ceremonial than its European counterparts; it is an architecture that Blavatsky would certainly have under- Side of the Bauhaus,” a quotation from which serves as stood. Its builders were not theorists engaged with the an epigraph to this introduction.12 For the most part, the nature of Theosophical space, but were enthusiasts abid- history of modernism has been shorn of such irrational ing in a seemingly untroubled fold in time. The buildings aspects. They have been cast as part of a limited, ulti- of the Theosophical Society in the United States are little mately dead-end expressionist mode; their influence con- known and the Willis piece serves as an important intro- fined to that of peripheral figures. Nevertheless, esoteri- duction to some of this material. cism remains a vital if cranky chapter in the richly tex- tured evolution of architecture in the early modern period. As recounted above, the “foundation myth” of the It was a moment when optimism no longer resided in pos- Theosophical Society is largely as it appears in the more itivism, when the realities of the nineteenth century had sober histories of Theosophy, and as Blavatsky and Olcott overtaken its heroic possibilities; when a retreat into an themselves told it. To give a more complete picture, one archaic past and the spiritual mist could provide a remove should mention that Blavatsky’s fame rested on her pow- from which new possibilities would ultimately emerge. V7n2: Introduction, Page 4

REFERENCES

This special theme issue of Architronic evolved from a session on esotericism and architecture held at the Society of Architectural Historians in 1996, co-chaired by Susan Henderson and Kristen Schaffer. I would like to thank my co-authors, and William Lucak and Alfred Willis in particular, for their efforts in the production of this issue.

1 Joseph Rykwert, “The Dark Side of the Bauhaus,” The Necessity of Artifice (New York, 1982), 49. 2 Gustav Pehnt. Expressionist Architecture (London, 1973), 37. Pehnt’s overview still provides the best brief history of this phenomenon. 3 Bettina-Martine Wolter draws some of the disparate threads together in her article “‘Die Kunst ist eine Aufführung des kosmischen Dramas’— Architekturvision und Bühnenreform 1900-1915,“ Okkultismus und Avantgarde. Von Munch bis Mondrian, 1900-1915, exhibition catalogue (Frankfurt, 1995). For both art and architecture the aforementioned catalogue is of great interest. On Hoetger and Roselius, see Susan Henderson “Böttcherstraße: The Corporatist Vision of Ludwig Roselius and Bernhard Hoetger,“ Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 20 (1994): 164- 181, and Elizabeth Tumasonis, “Bernhard Hoetger’s Tree of Life: German Expressionism and Racial Ideology,” Art Journal 51 (Spring 1992): 81- 91. The role of the occult in fascist ideology is chronicled in Nicholas Goodrick Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism. Secret Aryan cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. The Ariosophists of Austria and German 1890-1935 (New York, 1992). 4 See, for example, Joost Baljeu, “The Problem of Reality with Suprematism, Constructivism, Proun, Neoplasticism and Elementarism,” The Lugano Review 1 (1965): 104-124. 5 Okkultismus und Avantgarde.. See note 2 above. 6 The convention used throughout this issue is that “theosophy” refers generally to theosophical thought or study, the history of which extends back into the ancient world; whereas “Theosophy” refers particularly to the theoretical speculations and work of Blavatsky’s Society. 7 For more on Behrens and Berlage see my essay in this issue. Further discussion is found in H.P. Berlage, Grundlagen und Entwicklung der Architectur 1907, Manfred Bock, Anfänge einer neueun Architktur (‘S-Gravenhage, 1983), and Gisela Moeller, Peter Behrens in Düsseldorf: die Jahre von 1903 bis 1907 (Weinheim, 1991). 8 Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived. A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley, 1980), 26-27. A brief account of this same meeting is contained in Mark Bevir, “The West Turns Eastward: Madame Blavatsky and the Transformation of the Occult Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62 (Fall 1994): 747-768. 9 Esoteric in this context indicates the knowledge [gnosis] of self as a path to enlightenment. Esotericism indicates the vast tradition of such learn- ing and focuses on philosophical and theoretical speculation. Occultism refers to the parallel and related practices, such as magic, alchemy, and astrology, that often seek congress with supernatural phenomena. In the west, occultism is also concertedly non-Christian, whereas esotericism may or may not embrace aspects of Christian theology. The line between the two is complex and fluid. See Antoine Faivre, “Esotericism,” The Encyclopedia of Religion vol. 5, Mircea Eliade, ed. (New York, 1987): 156-163 and Antoine Faivre, “Occultism,” in ibid., vol. 11: 36-40. 10 The reverence for custom and a fascination with a medieval or classical golden age is the common thread among the Arts and Crafts Movement, segments of Art Nouveau and the Theosophists. 11 For this account see Peter Washington’s Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon. A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits who Brought Spiritualism to America (New York, 1993). Blavatsky’s cosmology developed into a complex system that embraced a series of Masters, some familiar, such as Buddha and Jesus, others deriving from the fringes of esoterica: Master Morya, for example, who served as Blavatsky’s particular teacher. Of her books on the Theosophical cosmology, the best known is Isis Unveiled (New York, 1877). 12 Rykwert, “The Dark Side of the Bauhaus,” 44.

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