The Divine Parallelepipeds

"Then, as this morning on the dock, again I saw, as if for the first time in my life, the impeccably straight streets, the glistening glass of the pavement, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent dwellings, the square harmony of the grayish blue rows of Numbers. And it seemed to me that not past generations, but I myself, had won a victory over the old god and the old life."

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1921

quoted in James C. Scott, Seeing like a State, 1998

Walter Gropius - Bauhaus master houses - Dessau - 1925/1926

Cornelius van Eesteren and Theo van Doesburg - Axonometrics east/north of Maison Particulière - 1923

Iakov Chernikov - Aristography - 1914/1927

Our Things in our Hands

“The light from the East is not only the liberation of worker, the light from the East is in the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades.”
Alexander Rodchenko, 'Rodchenko v Parizhe. Iz pisem domoi', Novyi lef, 1927
via Christina Kiaer

Unknown Photographer - Walter Gropius - 1968

via Exit Architects

"Since the universal power of the whole of nature is nothing but the power of all individual things together, it follows each individual thing has the sovereign right to do everything that it can do, or the right of each thing extends so far as its determined power extends"
Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, 1670

Jihad

"The image of the Reichsminister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, 

Joseph Goebbels, encouraging Mies van de Rohe to tender for prestigious 

regime projects encourages us to 'revisit' the whole subject of Nazism's 

famed jihad against modernism."
Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, 2007

 Mies van der Rohe - Reischsbank Proposal - 1933

Walter Gropius - Reichsbank Proposal - 1933

Heinrich Wolff - Reichsbank - 1934 - by Gary Catchen