Demiurgos

“To Hegel, the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos (the creator, the maker) of the real world.... With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” 

Karl Marx,
quoted here

Lyonel Feininger - Cathedral of Socialism - 1919

Cristopher Dresser - Plate XIX - ca. 1876
From his Studies in Design

Pablo Picasso - The guitarist - 1910

Non-Fictional

“Utopias are non-fictional even though they are also non-existent.” 

Frederic Jameson, The Politics of Utopia, 1982

André Devambez - The Charge - c.a.1902

Korean riot police choregraphy

Marianne von Werefkin - Schlittschuhläufer - 1911

Serene Buddhas

"I love machines . . . on their concrete bases, like serene Buddhas squatting on their timeless lotus" 
Henri Van der Velde, quoted in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, The Indivisibility of Design, 1962

Willi Baumeister - Mauerbild Mit Kreis - 1923

Robert Michel - 200 Horsepower Double "Gnome" Rotary Engine - 1921-22

Gerald Murphy - Watch - 1925

Essential Quality of being present

"The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present."

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863

Charles Demuth and Eugen O'Neill - ProvinceTown - ca. 1915?

Via Province Town Playhouse

Crystalline Structure

“The New Architecture might be compared to a crystalline structure in the process of formation. Its forms correspond to human laws and functions, which differ from those of nature or organic bodies. In its more immediate conception this New Architecture of ours is the ‘container’ of men’s domiciles, the orbit of their lives. Are our buildings identifiable with descriptions such as ‘cold’, ‘hard’, ‘empty-looking’, ‘ultra-logical’, ‘unimaginative and mechanistic in every detail’?”

Marcel Breuer, Where do we stand, 1935, 

quoted here

Buckminster Fuller at his Black Mountain studio

via Gwarlingo

Herzog & De Meuron - Beijing National Stadium - 2003-2008

M. C. Escher and his models