Metamorphosis inspires cultural impulses > Video series: ‘The First Goetheanum as a synthesis of the arts’

Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland, 20 April 2022

The Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, was intended as a building that would inspire cultural impulses. It was erected during the First World War by people from seventeen nations. One hundred years after its destruction by fire in 1922/1923, experts are discussing metamorphosis as a creative impulse in architecture, sculpture, painting and glass carving.

Built at the time of various reform movements, the Goetheanum became a place that sought to inspire fundamental life impulses, starting from individual development to a new approach to spheres of practice such as farming, medicine, education, and social work. At the same time, the building was an artistic and social project that was completed mostly by women during the final war years. “It is a building that makes the whole essence of Anthroposophy visible in artistic form,” says Christiane Haid about the First Goetheanum‘s special intention. She is head of both the Visual Art and the Humanities Section at the Goetheanum and initiator of the video series ‘The First Goetheanum as a Synthesis of the Arts’.

For this series Christiane Haid invited a number of experts to talk about their research into this cultural impulse from the point of view of architecture, sculpture, painting, and glass carving. It emerges that the building was not only conceived as a gesamtkunstwerk but it was to inspire formative principles and forms of living “that have remained culturally, politically and economically important to this day,” Christiane Haid adds. For Goethe‘s metamorphosis idea, which Rudolf Steiner continued to develop artistically, is visible in the architectural forms and colour designs of the First Goetheanum, and it is the key to understanding life in a way that has been used fruitfully In Goethean science and medicine to this day. Christiane Haid is convinced that “Goetheanism holds much potential for other areas, too.”

(1896 characters/SJ, English by Margot M. Saar)

Video series The First Goetheanum as a synthesis of the arts. Lectures and artistic exercises

Contact person Christiane Haid