Frank Chester: Imagining a Gotheanum-West

By John Beck

Frank Chester continues on a remarkable path of creative discovery. In 2012 he lectured at the world-class Rhode Island School of Design, and brought his work to the “eloquent concrete” of Rudolf Steiner’s second Goetheanum in Switzerland. In 2013 he began testing a water cleaning and enlivening system in a new research lab in Silicon Valley. Which seem far away visiting his apartment in San Francisco’s Presidio with the Pacific a few hundred feet away and its air streaming in.

Rudolf Steiner valued real expertise in specialized fields. He told medical students to get their standard MD first, then come work with him. Frank Chester had been hands-on with design and engineering for decades when he met Steiner’s thought and methods at Rudolf Steiner College. The models in his window, whether artistic and highly finished like the heart sculpture (further below), or a simple looking mock-up of a building, are full of thought and testing.

A small model for a “Goetheanum in the West” by Frank Chester

Some thirty years ago the idea surfaced of “a Goetheanum in the West”—understood to be probably a construction in the spirit, not in wood or concrete. But for Frank it was an obvious and practical question. Steiner’s second building is both closely related and very different from the first; Ita Wegman said it was designed for its enemies as well as its friends. Frank has embraced the same questions and placed them in a North American context. Over here, according to Steiner, humans are focused on sense experiences, so Frank externalizes the structural supports to expose new forms. He makes the surfaces evanescent with mesh and changing, tourmaline colors. Two spheres intersect, as in the original, but one above the other not side-by-side. Their intersection is left open to provide shifting light inside. Columns are not needed, so a series of sculptured bells express the seven steps of development. Everything is full of new geometry.

The Goetheanum-West model and much, much more can be explored, along with video talks and a new book, on a beautiful multimedia website created for Frank by Seth Miller at www.frankchester.com.

Frank Chester’s work online is at www.frankchester.com