A Fashion Story Set In Switzerland’s Most Eccentric Building
A collision of colors, textures, and prints finds a home at a Swiss architectural monument, photographed for GARAGE Issue 16 by Lukas Wassmann and styled by Victoria Sekrier.
I was relieved to be in Switzerland, right after the roving and spectacularly nihilistic riots had ripped through Paris, where the previous day I’d walked past hastily scrawled Stars of David defacing jewelry store windows and the incinerated frames of motor scooters and trash bins fouling the street. But, here, it was placid, difficult even to imagine unrest. After an hour-long flight from Paris to Zürich, a train ride nearly twice that duration from Zürich to Basel, and a half-hour tram-train combo from my hotel, in the center of town, to the 6,000-person municipality of Dornach, in the verdant foothills rippling out beyond Basel’s city limits, I found myself making my way up a slowly inclining road, past a smattering of sleek villas and cozy shops, until I stood there before it. The Goetheanum, an enormous, extraterrestrial-looking concrete structure, loomed over its foundation and several smaller, equally bizarre satellite buildings, simultaneously beckoning and unnerving this weary traveler.
I was relieved to be in Switzerland, right after the roving and spectacularly nihilistic riots had ripped through Paris, where the previous day I’d walked past hastily scrawled Stars of David defacing jewelry store windows and the incinerated frames of motor scooters and trash bins fouling the street. But, here, it was placid, difficult even to imagine unrest. After an hour-long flight from Paris to Zürich, a train ride nearly twice that duration from Zürich to Basel, and a half-hour tram-train combo from my hotel, in the center of town, to the 6,000-person municipality of Dornach, in the verdant foothills rippling out beyond Basel’s city limits, I found myself making my way up a slowly inclining road, past a smattering of sleek villas and cozy shops, until I stood there before it. The Goetheanum, an enormous, extraterrestrial-looking concrete structure, loomed over its foundation and several smaller, equally bizarre satellite buildings, simultaneously beckoning and unnerving this weary traveler.
In the late-19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche laid out a vision of radical love. The point was to reject what he saw as a creeping nihilism and sketch a worldly affirmation so expansive that it might say yes to life in all its beauty and horror, in all its perplexing permutations. For him, the clearest physical affirmation of life is dance. I was thinking of Nietzsche and of radical love and what it might mean for this world right now to embrace such a point of view as I made my way across the wide concrete esplanade and through the enormous wooden doors into what I took to be the reception area of the Goetheanum. It is difficult to know at first glance which side of the building is in fact its entrance, which its sides and its back. There are multiple points of access, and what I mistook for its front was actually closer to its back, but once inside, the notion of fronts and backs and flanks seemed frivolous in itself.
I stood in what is in fact not the first but the second Goetheanum—named after the 19th-century German writer, statesman, and Renaissance man Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The first Goetheanum had been the brainchild of Rudolf Steiner, the eccentric and brilliant Austrian founder of the ecumenical quasi-religious movement known as anthroposophy, which posits the spiritual realm as both real and comprehensible—wholly accessible to human experience and study. More ...
