ABSTRACT
This transformation can be observed in Figure 2.3,10 a photograph of an urban environment possibly taken by Jeanneret for a book that he was planning to publish with his mentor, Charles L’Eplattenier.11 One of several compositions that explored an increasingly popular belief that ‘the eye need not be bound by the verbal reasoning ... as the only “logical” form of thought’,12 this view of what might have been a common and traditional town square is overlaid with an arbitrary and temporary pattern of dark shapes – shadows cast by other buildings – that destabilize what one expects to see and understand. Jeanneret, while being highly selective in his framing of a relatively homogeneous environment, also shows the material qualities of the facades and the idiosyncratic shadow forms superimposed on them, thus testing the balance between the physical and the perceptual.
