Weave

Sybil Moholy-Nagy - László Moholy-Nagy - Germany - 1930s

Laelius

Lily Klee - Wassily Kandinsky & Paul Klee - 1929

Wassily

Karl Hubbuch - Marianne im Bauhausstuhl - 1930

Erich Consemüller - Woman (Marianne Brandt?) in Wassily B3 chair (Marcel Breuer) wearing a mask (Oskar Schlemmer) and a dress (fabric designed by Lis Beyer) - 1926

Photographer Unknown - Marcel Breuer on his Wassily B3 - 1928

Number, Measure, and Law

"We need number, measure, and law as armor and as a weapon, lest we be swallowed up by chaos."

Oskar Schlemmer, Perspektiven, 1932

quoted by Beau H Rhee

Koloman Moser - Flower basket S 781 - 1906

Giuseppe Terragni - Casa del Fascio - Como - 1932

Sol Lewitt - 21B - 1989
via Archive of Affinities

Stretching his Hand to the Master of Things

“In place of a romantic, an idealist, an aristocratic dreamer about pure symbol, about abstract aesthetics of the word, in place of symbolism, futurism and imaginism, arrived a living poetry of the word-object, and its creator is not an idealist-dreamer Mozart, but a rigorous and severe artist-master Salieri, stretching his hand to the master of things and materialistic values, to the builder and producer of the material (reified) world.“ 
Ossip Mandelstam, O prirode slovaб 1922, 
quoted and translated in Edward Możejko, “Tracing the Modernist Paradigm” 
in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson, 2007 vol.1

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - Unnown Photographer - 1937

via moholy-nagy.org

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

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

Between the Present and Past Worlds

"A grey wall, a green ruin, rusty pike, 
Make my soul pass the equinoctial line 
Between the present and past worlds, and hover 
Upon their airy confine, half-seas-over"

G. G. Byron, Canto X of Don Juan, 1818-23
quoted here

Jacques Lipchitz - Man with a madolin - 1917

Oskar Schlemmer - Solemn Tragedians - 1924

Mark Epstein - Worker - 1922
via Third Organ

My Nightmare Yields

“Unprincipled men tried to malign our time. Always we had to look back, always we had to be modelled on another time. But my nightmare yields. Yes, our time is beautiful. So beautiful, that I don’t want to live in another.”
Adolf Loos, quoted here

Farkas Molnar - The red cube - 1923

via Ross Wolfe

Gloria Freedman - Le Carré Rouge - 1997

Luis Barragan - Casa Gilardi - 1976

photography by Kim Zwarts, 1988

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

A Five Year Plan For Chess

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. 

We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess', like the formula 'art for art's sake'. 

We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.” 

Nikolai Krylenko, quoted in Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment

Friedrich Froebel - Fifth Gift - Circa 1900

 Joseph Hartwig - Bauhaus Chess Set - 1922

Moshe Safdie - Six Module Component System - 1968

Gunta Stölzl and Arieh Sharon at the beach

“If physical objects please you, praise God for them, but turn back your love to their Creator, 

lest, in those things which please you, you displease him” 

Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Book IV, Chapter XII-18

Gunta Stölzl and Arieh Sharon - Varazze, Italy - 1930

via Future Giraffes