Come hear University of Michigan German professor and Goethean Scholar Fred Amrine speak on Steiner’s Expressionist Architecture. Join us for two lectures in one 90-minute talk:

“Rudolf Steiner’s First and Second Goetheanum” — The architect Hans Scharoun, whose Berlin Philharmonic is one of the masterpieces of the postwar era, declared Rudolf Steiner’s Second Goetheanum “the most important building of the first half of the 20th century.” A remarkable assertion, and even more so given that Steiner himself considered the Second Goetheanum but a pale shadow of the First. Prof. Amrine’s first slide lecture will provide an overview of both the First Goetheanum and its successor, together with a discussion of Steiner’s main ideas as an architectural theorist.

“Expressionist Architecture” — All great geniuses are both unique and a reflection of larger contemporary movements. So it was with Rudolf Steiner, who can be situated within the great early 20th-century artistic movement that has come to be called Expressionism. Both in his theories and in his artistic practice, Steiner realized the high aesthetic and spiritual ideals toward which others such Wassily Kandinsky, Antoni Gaudi, Hans Poelzig, Bruno Taut, Max Baer, Eric Mendelsohn and Hans Scharoun were striving in his time. Although many considered it a marginal phenomenon in the early 20th century, it returned with great force later in the century: many of the greatest postwar buildings can be seen as continuations of the expressionist program. Hence Steiner’s architecture was pioneering, and surprisingly contemporary.