Schools, Farms and a Building in Dornach

Steiner's movement is unusual among esoteric currents in being encountered today mostly through institutions that do not advertise their origin. The first Waldorf school opened in 1919 for the children of workers at the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, at the invitation of its director; the pedagogy, built on Steiner's account of seven year phases of child development, spread into one of the largest independent school networks in the world. Biodynamic agriculture began with a lecture course to farmers at Koberwitz in 1924, and its preparations, composts and planting calendar, whatever one makes of their rationale, made it a recognised pioneer of organic farming with its own certification mark.

Anthroposophical medicine, developed with the physician Ita Wegman, produced clinics and a pharmacopoeia; curative education led to the Camphill communities for people with developmental disabilities, founded by his followers after his death. The centre of it all was built twice. The first Goetheanum at Dornach in Switzerland, a double domed building in carved wood realising his ideas of organic architecture, burned on New Year's Eve 1922, arson being suspected and never proved; Steiner immediately designed a second in raw sculptural concrete, completed after his death and now a listed monument of expressionist architecture. The institutions carry an argument: that a spiritual science should be judged by what it builds, and by whether what it builds outlives it.