Between "Silhouette d'une ville" and "Patriotisme": Analyzing those Conceptions in “La Construction des Villes” through the Lens of Georges de Montenach’s “Pour le visage aimé de la patrie"

Abstract

This paper delves into Charles-Édouard Jeanneret’s inaugural urban study La Construction des Villes, exploring his pursuit of fostering citizens’ ‘local patriotism’. While Jeanneret, also known as young Le Corbusier, emphasises the importance of physical urban forms in generating this sentiment, the specific mechanism behind the emergence of local patriotism remains unclear in the manuscript. Our objective is to clarify the uniqueness and historical context of Jeanneret’s thoughts on local patriotism by examining its ideological background, particularly the foundation for creating this sentiment. The key concept, the ‘silhouette of a city’, borrowed from Georges de Montenach, lacks specific examples or forms in Jeanneret’s work. Jeanneret argues that visual clarity and its beauty form the basis for local patriotism. This abstraction, excluding the specificity of the place and translating symbolism into visual clarity, foreshadows Le Corbusier’s later modernist ideas. Unlike previous interpretations of inhabitants’ visual experiences, aligned with pre-modern German-speaking spatial theory, Jeanneret’s description of the silhouette of a city externalises the viewing subject, applying a limited scope of the landscape aligning with contemporary French-speaking discussions. The resulting collective consciousness, shared by external observers perceiving a clear silhouette of a city, is conceptualized as local patriotism.