In high school, I dreamed of becoming an architect.
I wanted to design beautiful buildings to live and work in, beautiful buildings to look at. After leaving school I studied architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. However, after two years, I decided to drop out. I hadn’t found what I was looking for: a deeper understanding of the art of architecture. My godfather, who was an architect and who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright in America, was unable to impart to me any deeper inspiration for architecture. He, too, failed to provide answers to my questions. But although I felt quite lost, I knew there were answers, and that a way to them could be found.
Shortly after my 21st birthday, I came into contact with Anthroposophy. I bought various books and lecture cycles by Rudolf Steiner. I read and read, and felt a new life transforming my soul. Then one day, in a bookshop in Cape Town, I picked up a book on the two Goetheanum buildings. I knew immediately: this architecture was what I had been searching for. The inner and outer beauty of the buildings radiated the Spirit that I had found in the books and lectures by Steiner that I had been reading.
To my astonishment, I realized that nowhere in the School of Architecture in Johannesburg had this “style” ever been discussed or even mentioned!
Thus began a new path for me, and with it the rediscovery of my dream of being an architect. I felt freed of the constraints and limitations of “modern architecture”! I felt simultaneously challenged and inspired in a new way. The initiate-architect Rudolf Steiner had revealed the goal of all architectural striving: in the Goetheanum buildings, he had consciously created the first jewels of the New Jerusalem—that cosmic spiritual-physical city described in the Bible’s “Book of Revelation.” It is said that it will be built by those who are “written in the register of the living of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:27). This refers to those people who have united themselves with the “Lamb,” i.e. with Christ, and who cooperate with the spiritual beings of the hierarchies in this creation. With Rudolf Steiner as my guiding star, I have striven to add a few, small, not very well polished, but earnestly intended, carats to the New Jerusalem.
This year, we bring you a series of articles titled “Rudolf Steiner as…” to honor the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death—sometimes an essay, sometimes simply a thought or reflection—always, an aspect of his being.
