Part Two: The Procedings of
the Conference
The Idea of the Future Building in
Dornach
Lecture
by Rudolf Steiner
31 December, In the
Morning
My dear friends!
As you may
imagine, I have recently given much thought to the idea of
the building in Dornach, and the situation will most
certainly necessitate the earliest possible execution of this
idea of this building in Dornach.
A great many
of you were present in the summer when the financing of the
future Goetheanum was discussed.
[ Note 68 ]
Everything that
came to light then, when our friends revealed their
willingness to make infinite sacrifices, and all the
observations of the situation I have made since then, force
me to the opinion that there is no other way but to proceed
as rapidly as possible to the construction of a Goetheanum
here, even if externally this Goetheanum cannot present the
image we would dearly have liked to promise ourselves.
It seems to
me that this Goetheanum must be erected in such a way as to
make it usable as expediently as possible.
But if the
idea about the building expressed at the meeting in the
summer were to be realized, it would definitely not be
possible to use it in a suitable way once it was finished.
For is it not so that, in considering all the possibilities,
we must look, might I say, through the walls, that is through
the walls of the wallets of our dear friends. I know very
well that what I am about to put to you will be met, out of
the utmost good will, by many objections. And yet I still
believe that the situation will prove me right when I say
that the best way to proceed will be to plan for a Goetheanum
of which the actual building costs do not exceed 3 to 3½
million Francs. Only then, even with the utmost willingness
for sacrifice, shall we be in a position truly fruitfully to
serve the intentions inaugurated in our new Statutes.
It would not
be at all sensible if, as the Anthroposophical Society, we
were to spend every last penny simply on the building itself.
This would not be a good thing to do. So I do believe that
the right idea would be to spend about 3 to 3½ million
on the building to start with. If it is to be built in
accordance with the situation as it actually is, then it must
be as resistant as possible to damage such as that which
unfortunately destroyed the old Goetheanum. And, as I have
already pointed out in my articles in
Das Goetheanum,
[ Note 69 ]
it must make available as much space as possible for
anthroposophical activities. So we shall have to restrict
ourselves somewhat. But I believe that just because of this
we can be all the more certain of achieving what was pointed
out yesterday, especially on the part of the young people:
that above all a spiritual Goetheanum must exist here as soon
as is in any way possible.
Today I want
to start by explaining the ground-plan of the Goetheanum to
you and then tomorrow I shall speak more about the elevation,
the facade. I want to shape the ground-plan and the whole
distribution of the space to be taken up by the Goetheanum in
the following way.
The
Goetheanum will not be as round a building as the old
Goetheanum was. It is all very well to ask why I have not
brought the model to show you, my dear friends. But you must
not forget that this new Goetheanum is to be built in a
relatively new material, concrete. And to give a concrete
building a truly artistic character in keeping with the
material is exceedingly difficult; the solution to this
problem is very demanding.
You know Dr
Grosheintz has had a house built near here which I have
attempted to design in a style appropriate to concrete.
[ Note 70 ]
But though I still believe that this style might
be considered satisfactory for a dwelling to a certain degree
— but only to a certain degree — it would
nevertheless be impossible to build a second house to exactly
the same plan. In any case it certainly did not yield an
architectural style for a Goetheanum built of concrete. For
the new Goetheanum it will be necessary to depart —
essentially — from the idea of a circular building; we
shall come back not to a circular building but to one that is
more rectangular, a building with angles.
You can see
the intention in the small building lower down the hill that
was built to provide a hall for eurythmy practice.
[ Note 71 ]
It is built in a different material, but it shows that an
angular building has considerable potential.
Now since
there is the need to provide stages for eurythmy and the
Mystery Dramas, it will be necessary to combine an angular
building with a circular one. In addition, the new Goetheanum
will have to provide space for the various activities. We
shall need studios and we shall need lecture rooms. The
single small white hall in which the fire first broke out a
year ago had turned out to be quite inadequate for our
purposes. So the next Goetheanum would have to be built in
such a way that it would have a lower level — a ground
floor — and an upper level. The upper level would,
essentially, be the large auditorium for lectures and for
those who come to hear and see the performances of eurythmy,
the Mystery Dramas and other things. And on the lower level,
beneath this auditorium, would be smaller rooms, divided off
by walls, which would provide space for artistic and
scientific purposes.
I also intend
to create a space for the administration of the General
Anthroposophical Society, so that this can be carried out
direct from the Goetheanum.
In the idea
of this building I also want to solve a certain problem in
what seems to me a practical way. The plan will be such that
there will be a stage at the rear with a rounded form.
(Please don't take any notice of the proportions in this
drawing.) The stage will essentially form a semi-circle. It
will be enclosed by store-rooms. And then extending forwards
there will be at the upper level the auditorium and at the
lower level the various rooms, with a passage-way in between
so that in future there will be more freedom of movement in
this new Goetheanum than there was in the old. In the old
Goetheanum you stepped straight inside from a vestibule at
the entrance. Here, so that there can be freedom of movement,
there will be a heated area in which it will be possible to
meet and converse in all kinds of ways. And this passage-way
will give access to the various rooms on the lower level.
[ See
Facsimile 5, Page XVIII bottom. ]
Then, going
up a staircase, you will come to the large auditorium from
which you look on to the stage or the space where lectures
and other things will take place.
The practical
problem I just mentioned is the following: In the old
Goetheanum great inconvenience was caused by the fact that
eurythmy rehearsals had to take place on the stage itself.
When visitors came from elsewhere, and I hope they will
continue to come in the future, they wanted to see
everything; but the auditorium was needed for the work, so it
was never possible to allocate time properly in a way that
was needed for rehearsals and preparations for
performances.
I now want to
solve this problem by having on the ground floor, that is the
lower level, a stage of exactly the same size as that on the
upper level. The one on the upper level will serve for the
actual performances while the one down below, having
identical measurements, will be for rehearsals only. So there
will be a room down below which can serve for all rehearsals
up to the dress rehearsal, thus leaving the upper auditorium
free at all times. The lower hall will have an ante-room just
for those taking part in the rehearsals, where they may wait
and sit down. On the upper level the stage will give straight
on to the auditorium. The auditorium will be the same size as
the plan of the rectangular part of the building.
In this way
it will be possible to work in a practical manner in all the
available space. It will not be necessary to make the new
Goetheanum very much taller than the old Goetheanum, since I
am not considering a new cupola. I am endeavouring to create
a design for the roof which will consist of a series of
planes arranged in relation to one another in a way which
will, I believe, be no less aesthetically attractive than a
cupola.
So we shall
enter into the Goetheanum through a facade on the main front
which I shall describe tomorrow. There we shall find the
staircase leading to the main upper space; and we shall have
a passage-way from which the different rooms are reached, and
so on. There will also be entrances at the sides. By making
the stage space smaller on plan than the store area, and by
extending the walls forwards, we will gain space for the
different rooms. At the top it will be possible to light the
whole space with daylight, so that we can alternate between
daylight, when it is there, and artificial light when we need
it.
In this way
it will be possible to have a really practical building in
which every cubic foot of space can be used to the full. A
great deal will be able to go on in this building all at
once, whereas in the old building only one thing at a time
could take place.
You must
consider, my dear friends, that this is not simply intended
to be an improvement — which perhaps some might
consider a dis-improvement — but it is designed to take
account of all the developments that have come about. I have
often stressed amongst ourselves that if you want to live in
reality and not in ideas, then the realities of the time must
be given particular recognition. The time in which one lives
is a reality. But it is difficult to generate an
understanding for this time as being something real. There
are still people today who represent the threefolding of the
social organism with the very sentences I used to use with
regard to the conditions prevailing at the time, in 1919.
History is indeed advancing so rapidly just now that if
someone describes things in the way they were described in
1919 this seems to be hundreds of years out of date. Thus,
since things have after all been happening in the
Anthroposophical Movement, you cannot build in 1924 as you
did in 1913 and 1914. In 1913 and 1914 the idea of the
Goetheanum arose simply out of the realization that an
artistic space would have to be created for the Mystery
Dramas. At that time we really only thought of the Mystery
Dramas and the lectures. But much has happened since those
days and I only wish that even more had happened, but I hope
that quite soon a good deal more will happen even without the
75 million Francs I spoke about earlier. This must certainly
be taken into consideration.
The thing
that has happened since 1919 is that eurythmy has been
developed.
[ Note 72 ]
In 1913 it did not yet exist, it has only developed since.
Therefore it cannot be maintained that what was good enough
then can be good enough now. Furthermore, although I was assured
at the time that the building could be executed at a cost of much
less than one million German Reichs-marks, nevertheless, as
you know, the cost in the end was at least seven or eight
times as much. So we do not want to do our sums in the
abstract this time. We want to reckon with certain quite
definite figures. The building must now be executed in such a
way that we can start to carry out what is contained in our
Statutes as soon as possible. This can only happen if we
erect it in the manner described.
Even so, it
will be possible to win, from the intractable material of
concrete, forms that offer something new to the artistic eye.
The old forms of the Goetheanum — I shall have more to
say to you about these things this evening — will have
to belong to history, which means your hearts, my dear
friends. Forms moulded in concrete will have to be something
entirely different. Much will have to be done on the one hand
to force the intractable material of concrete into forms
which the eye of the human soul can follow artistically and
on the other hand to mould seemingly decorative features,
which are actually a consequence of the concrete itself, in
an artistic and sculptural way, so that the material of
concrete can for once be revealed in an artistic manner.
I ask you now
to regard this idea as the seed out of which the Goetheanum
shall actually emerge. I have stated that I alone am allowed
to work on the artistic creation of the Goetheanum and it
will not be possible to take on board to any great extent any
of those offers or suggestions which have already been made
— of course with the best intentions. There is no point
in telling me of buildings in concrete that have been put up
here or there, or of factories here or there that are working
efficiently. If the Goetheanum building is to come about in
concrete, it will have to emerge from an original idea, and
nothing that has so far been achieved in concrete can serve
as a basis for what is to come into being here.
This, my dear
friends, is what I wanted to say to you today. It was not in
any way intended to put a stop to the collections already set
in train by our dear friend van Leer or by others
representing the different countries. The sum originally
envisaged will still be needed if we are to carry out what
must, of necessity, be carried out. Perhaps I can spur on
your zeal in this direction even more by saying that we shall
try to use the money you collect in the most economical way
by putting it towards anthroposophical work in the sense that
it will be used for running the Goetheanum and that the
Goetheanum will be built using the smallest amount possible.
We shall endeavour here to bring a Goetheanum into being in
the shortest possible time.
Tomorrow I
shall speak about the image the Goetheanum will present to
the outside, namely its facade.
I now want to
return to something that is being brought to me from many
sides like a kind of derivative of fear. On all sides I am
being asked how the three Classes and the Sections of the
School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum are to be
handled. My dear friends, in the first place the Sections are
no one's concern. The Sections are being set up for the work
here. There is no need for us to discuss the Sections. They
will exist in accordance with whatever is achieved. So really
we can only speak about the General Anthroposophical Society
as the foundation, and about the three Classes. And I believe
that everything relevant is stated with absolute clarity in
our Statutes. In Paragraph 5 it says: ‘Members of the
Society will be admitted to the School on their own
application after a period of membership to be determined by
the leadership at the Goetheanum. They enter in this way the
First Class of the School of Spiritual Science. Admission to
the Second or Third Classes takes place when the person
requesting it is deemed eligible by the leadership at the
Goetheanum.’
‘Paragraph 7. The organizing of the School of Spiritual
Science is, to begin with, the responsibility of Rudolf
Steiner, who will appoint his collaborators and his possible
successor.’
These
sentences express, I believe, with absolute clarity that it
is necessary to apply to me personally either in writing or
in person; it would be better to start by saying in writing,
since there will be too many personal applications to be
dealt with on the spot. The matter will be taken from there.
That is what it says here. The storm of queries is perhaps
not so much the result of unclarity as of the necessity, my
dear friends, to become accustomed to clarity. Perhaps
unclarity is what is wanted in some quarters. Pedantry must
be excluded, and bureaucracy will be banished across the
border, but in everything that emanates from here — at
least this is what we intend — absolute clarity shall
reign. From what is written here it is clear that a little
note is all that is needed. The little note should be
addressed to me personally. And you will see how the answer
will be given. You must have confidence.
That is what
I wanted to say. Herr Hahl has asked to speak about the
building of the Goetheanum. Please would you now speak.
Herr Hahl
speaks on this subject.
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