However, Mondrian seems to have been utterly convinced by the Theosophical belief that matter was the enemy of spiritual enlightenment, and that all forms of material appearance in history were about to be swept away by a new age whose prophets were Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky.

Marcel Breuer fantasized about replacing chairs with rising columns of air on which people would sit like Ping-Pong balls on water-jets in shooting galleries, thus eliminating all obstruction to the pure flow of space.

an idealist group in The Netherlands named de Stijl – “the Style,” suggesting a final consensus about form and function at the end of history, the ultimate style. Its principal members, apart from Rietveld, were the sculptor George Vantongerloo, the painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, and J. P. Oud the architect.

In a way Corbusier was quite right to admire Louis, since only despotism could have swept away the zoning laws and rights of private property that impeded the construction of his own exemplary New Jerusalem,

“Le Corbusier” – the crowlike one.

What most of their projects had in common was an alarming obsession with social hygiene. In future, instead of lurking on streets and squares and alleys, the human beetle would be made to live in tower blocks, to commute by monorail or biplane or moving pavement, to scuttle about in allotted green space between the

skyscrapers, and in general to do one thing at one time in one specified place, which accorded with the coming rationalization of all human life.

Mies was not interested in town planning, but his German and French colleagues in the 1920s were. The central image of the new architecture was not the single building. It was the Utopian town plan, and the planners of the time saw their paper cities with the detachment granted to possessors of the bird’s-eye view – very high up, very abstract, and

Mies chillingly put it, “the individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.”