ABSTRACT
La Construction des villes could have become Le Corbusier’s first publication in 1910. The Manuscript, written by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier’s birth name), remained in an unfinished state, yet it supplies new discoveries and information on how his convictions about urban planning emerged. The Manuscript also constitutes a remarkable counterpoint to his later urban design ideas, as in the 1922 Ville Contemporaine or the 1925 Plan Voisin, published that year as part of Urbanisme. Jeanneret’s work is of historical significance because it engages intensively with the German-language debate on aesthetically oriented city planning at the time. Its most important aspect is Jeanneret’s appreciation of urban space, which is central to La Construction des villes, and one of its greatest strengths. The complete 1910/11 Manuscript only came to light in 1999; the text presented here is a translation of the bilingual French/German version published by gta Verlag in Zurich in 2008.
