When I am asked how the single form emerging from the whole is to be experienced, I can only say this: Consider for example a walnut. The walnut has a shell. The nutshell is formed around the nut, around the kernel, by the same laws as brought the nut itself into being. You could not imagine the nutshell other than it is, once the kernel itself is as it is.
—Rudolf Steiner
From the structural engineer's drawings for the formwork.
large front glazed opening, a connection to nature. To the east and west are rooms and a terrace from which one has views of the landscape, respectively. At the top of the stairway, outside the doors to the main auditorium, is a large window of deep red engraved glass. The visitor, before entering the auditorium, can no longer see nature, but motifs relating to what “the human being encounters when he turns away from nature and looks inwards to contemplate his own spiritual experience.”
The auditorium is trapezoidal, which adapts well as a spectator area, expanding towards the stage. This foreshortens the depth experience for the spectator. Although the space is excellent visually, it has acoustic problems which still have not been reconciled.
To him [Steiner], architectural forms were organic growths undergoing the same metamorphoses as plant and animal life. His goal was to ‘imbue forms with life’, to establish ‘a harmony of supporting and downward-bearing forces’ and to achieve a balanced ‘counterpoint of concave and convex architectonic forms.’ The static, geometrical form of previous generations, he felt, were not adequate to express his new Spiritual Science.
The experience of walking inside this building is described as moving around inside a giant sculpture. There are no smaller sculptural motifs as there were in the first Goetheanum. The forms of bones and the skeleton gave particular inspiration. Steiner’s buildings have an axis of symmetry (in accordance with “the organic form principle”).
The circle dominates the plan and section of this building, but conscious effort is made to avoid using the concentric principle alone. Two sections of the building in the west break out of the circle. Some Anthroposophists see the circle as rigid, under the spell of a self-centered, [more...]
egoistic principle. “In face of the plain circle a person sensitive to form will feel that he is placed on this own resources, resting within himself (a). To begin with this unarticulated line allows of two characteristic tendencies. In the first of these, rounded protrusions appear in the form of a wavy line (b), proclaiming the “victory from within”. In the other, a zigzag line indicates that external forces have won the ascendancy (c). To round out the picture, attention is drawn to a third, less elementary development in this series, in which the wavy movement shows a definite direction (d). The experience we are discussing can be induced by a mere fragment of one of these forms (e).”(Hagen, The Goetheanum…)
All buildings on the site face the main building. Utility structures—the “Heizhaus” (central heating plant), the “Verlugshaus” and the “Glashaus”—are sited on the north side, whereas the private houses lie more to the south. The main building is zoned similarly, with the larger, northern (shadowed) entrance used for access to the stage. Visitors and those who work at the Goetheanum use primarily the West and South entrances.
Anthroposophists talk of how the materials for concrete must pass through the four stages of the elementary states, namely earth, water, air and fire. But the mechanical processes that it must go through completely divorce it from life, growth and the whole of nature. It no longer knows what it wants to be, or how it wants to act, so must be formed out of human insight and artistic sensitivity. Concrete’s high specific mass evens out the daily temperature curve, but also makes it always feel cold to the touch. This makes us feel cold in the room, even if the temperature of the air is 
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