Edith Marion Foundation

Michael Riggenbach, Chairman of the Foundation Board, leaves the Foundation

After 34 years as Chairman of the Foundation Board, co-founder Michael Riggenbach has decided to step down by the end of June 2024. He looks back on "good and fruitful years, full of wonderful encounters, project developments, challenges and, in particular, good collaboration within the Foundation". The Foundation Board will shortly be appointing a successor to the presidency. The Foundation Board, the Advisory Committee and the wider family of Foundation employees will miss Michael's invaluable input and collaboration!

...25 years of secretariat with Christoph Langscheid

The history of the secretariat is closely linked to the acquisition of the office premises in Basel, Gerbergasse 30, in 1999. On 1 February of that year, Christoph Langscheid took over as director, having decided to leave his position at Crédit Suisse to devote himself to organising the secretariat. Until that point, he and the other two co-founders, Michael Riggenbach and John Ermel, had worked for the foundation on a freelance basis (for about nine years).

Edith Maryon celebrated on Thursday 2 May 2024

2 May 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Edith Maryon's death. The foundation will celebrate the sculptor at a series of events in Basel and Dornach. In cooperation with the Visual Art Section of the Goetheanum, the foundation has organised a programme of lectures, guided tours and exhibitions. Peter Selg, Edith Maryon's biographer, will give  at 8 p.m. a lecture at the Rudolf Steiner School in Basel about her work with Rudolf Steiner, her commitment to low-cost housing in Dornach, her high social consciousness and her translation of R. Steiner's The Central Points of the Social Question.

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About Edith Maryon

At the end of the '80s, a group of young people from Arlesheim, a village near Basel, took an interest in a fundamental work by Rudolf Steiner, The Central Points of the Social Question, and dedicated an in-depth study to it. What they were looking for in it were foundations for concrete actions. In 1990, some of them set up a charitable foundation for the promotion of social housing and gave it the name of Edith Maryon: the English sculptor, a close associate of Rudolf Steiner, had engaged in a social housing project about a century earlier.

Edith Maryon was born in London in 1872, where she grew up with five brothers and sisters. She attended a school for girls and later her father, tailor John Simeon Maryon, and his wife, Louisa Church, sent their daughter to a boarding school in Geneva. On her return, Edith embarked on a course of study in the plastic arts at the Royal College of Arts, making a name for herself through her classically inspired portraits and reliefs done in a traditionalist style.

From London to Dornach, via Germany

In 1913, Edith Maryon settled first in Munich, then in Berlin, a year later in Dornach. Together with Marie von Sivers and Ita Wegman she forms the closest circle to Rudolf Steiner. For years she maintained an intensive, preserved correspondence with the founder of anthroposophy. Together with him, she conceived the large sculpture of the Representative of Humanity and the eurythmy figures, which Maryon made in wood. Her works were no longer classical, but inspired by Rudolf Steiner's philosophy.
In the early 1920s, Dornach lacked affordable housing. Edith Maryon designed three houses for the co-workers of the Goetheanum, which were then built on the Dornach hill. At the time they were called the English houses, today rather the eurythmists' houses.
In 1923 Edith Maryon was struck down by tuberculosis. At the end of the year she was appointed director of the Visual Art Section at the Goetheanum, without actually being able to take up her duties: she died on 2 May 1924 at the age of 52, in Dornach, the village she had loved so much.

The foundation continues the work of Edith Maryon

In 1990 Christoph Langscheid, John Ermel and Michael Riggenbach set up the foundation in memory of Edith Maryon and her commitment to social housing. The starting capital is 12,000 francs. The non-profit organisation rescues land and buildings from speculation, securing real estate or commercial premises at favourable prices and supporting social and cultural projects.

* This motto, with which she was admitted into the Stella Matutina order in 1909, would mark Edith Maryon's life and work.
 

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