The first houses on place grew there at the beginning of the 20th century, when a certain Emil Grosheintz, a dentist by profession, offered the plot to the Austrian Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the founder of anthroposophy, an "science of occult".
It was in the center of Munich, where he founded the movement, where he initially intended to establish himself, but his project stalled and the Swiss option, in 1913, seemed providential. Steiner moved to Dornach with his wife Marie, in a house at the foot of the hill where he lived until the last months of his life. His illness then forced her to settle in his workshop, next to the Goetheanum, to continue working.
Steiner studied design at the Technical University of Vienna, but never architecture. Like so many other activities he did, he did it on his own, with the help of engineers and architects who drew up the plans. Of the 180 houses and small teams that have been established since his arrival on Green Hill, Steiner has designed eleven.
After the destruction of the first Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner became involved in 1924 in a second project to replace the one that already existed. Steiner built this time a building totally made of concrete to obtain sculptural forms in architectural scale.
The use of concrete to get expressive organic shapes was an innovation in the epoch. Here the concepts of the mineral and the vegetal are joined to create all the odd forms that vitalizes the building. The fluid surfaces and the dynamism of the elements should be understood under Steiner’s and his foundation point of view, in which all the phenomena were changing from a state to another and that all the visible and tangible things were expressions of internal process.
The building includes two performance halls with a capacity of 1500 people both together; it has spaces for exhibition and reading, one library, one book shop and administrative spaces for the Anthroposophy Society. The adjacent buildings have the education and research facilities.
In the 50s and the end of the 90s the central auditorium had been redesigned. All the stained-glass windows are the original ones of the Steiner’s period. The paintings of the ceilings are present reinterpretations and replicas inspired in the first Goetheanum.
On the other hand, William Curtis comments on that Kandinsky could have influence on Steiner. These one had an effect inside the spirituality of the guided shapes, the Bruno Taut’s crystalline and alpine imagery, and even by the Art Nouveau’s formal canons.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Hans Scharoun and Frank Gehry are some important architects that became interested in visiting the Goetheanum.
