Goetheanum

And at its heart, beneath all the complexity and all the controversy, lay the simple, practical teaching on inner calm that we have been following.

He established a cultural and organizational center for the Anthroposophical movement at the Goetheanum, a remarkable building in Dornach, Switzerland, that Steiner himself designed.

The original Goetheanum was a building unlike anything Europe had seen: a vast double-domed structure built entirely of wood, its forms flowing and organic rather than angular and geometric, its interior carved with intricate motifs meant to embody the living qualities of nature rather than the dead symmetry of conventional architecture.

Steiner designed it down to the smallest detail, including the colored glass windows, the painted ceilings, and the carved wooden columns, each of which was shaped according to a different metamorphic principle drawn from Goethe's studies of plant growth.

The building was a work of art as much as a work of architecture, and hundreds of volunteers from across Europe came to Dornach to help construct it, working alongside professional craftsmen in a spirit of communal devotion that must have been extraordinary to witness.

On New Year's Eve 1922, while a celebration was being held inside, arsonists set fire to the building.

By morning, the Goetheanum was a ruin.

Its wooden forms, its carved columns, its painted ceilings, all reduced to ash.

And after the First World War, his anthroposophy became increasingly important to her.

She joined the Anthroposophical Society in 1920 and studied at the Goetheanum in Switzerland.

Around 1927, she sent a version of her Tree of Knowledge there, hoping it would be displayed.

It was not.