ABSTRACT

Thanks to the research of Allen Brooks and others, Charles Edouard Jeanneret’s attention to the ideas of Camillo Sitte, the extent to which they guided his early investigations of urbanism, and their seminal role in shaping his unpublished manuscript of La Construction des Villes is now a fairly well known part of the history of modern architecture.1 As such, it provides a logical prequel to his far better known – because, of course, it was published at the time – and suspiciously vehement rejection of Sitte’s approach to urbanism in L’Esprit Nouveau in 1924, republished in Urbanisme later in the same year.2 Suspicious insofar as one can see, at least in retrospect, that even as fire-breathing avant-garde polemicist, the author – now “Le Corbusier” – might have been protesting a bit too much. The rejection, it turns out, was not simply of a hopelessly passé, and wrong-headed approach to the design of cities, but also – much closer to home – of the author’s own “juvenile” position, and one in which he invested a considerable amount of intellectual capital.