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Charlotte Perriand
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Charlotte Perriand 1903 - 1999 Born in Paris in 1903 Charlotte Perriand grew up in both Paris and the Savoie: a rural mountainous region of South Eastern France - where her grand parents had a farm. Her father was a tailor and her mother was an haute couture seamstress. So it is fair to say that the art and practice of design, and particularly designs tailored to the human body were familiar to her from an early age. In 1920 at the age of 17 she enrolled at the Ecole de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs to study furniture design. Where she studied for five years under the tutelage of French designer, Henri Rapen. The Baux-Arts aesthetic espoused by the school was not 'modern enough' for her though. She was one of the very first modernist designers - to draw inspiration from the 'machine age' the metal and glass of the automobiles and bicycles in the streets around her, the clean functional lines of utilitarian objects designed for serve basic human needs. In 1926, a year after graduation she married her first husband and moved into a rented garret with her husband on Place Saint Sulpice in Paris. She proceeded to gut the interior of the apartment and transform its largest room into a metal and glass bar, rather than a conventional living room. Fascinated by her vision of the 'machine age interior' she could not bring herself to go to work for one of the Baux-Arts artisanal furniture manufacturers on Faubourg Saint Antoine. The Le Corbusier Years Drawn to the clean gleam of chromed metal and glass, she intensely disliked the columns, swags and garlands of the classically derived popular style. And so it was that she began to despair of finding work that she enjoyed in the furniture design industry and considered studying agriculture instead. Luckily for modern furniture design, a friend of hers suggested that she read two books by Le Corbusier, 1923’s Vers une Architecture and 1925’s L’Art Décoratif d’Aujourd’hui. She was so impressed by the ideas that he presented in his books that she determined to work for him. In 1927 at the age of 24 she strode into Le Corbusier's studio at 35 rue de Sevres, Paris and asked for a job as a furniture designer. His response is legend for its unabashed chauvinism - "We don't embroider cushions here" he said. It is a true testament to her vision and her strength that Charlotte Periand decided to go home and execute her vision (and that of Le Corbusier) herself. 
Later the same year she held a one woman exhibition at the Salon d’Automne. The show was called Bar sous le Toit (rooftop bar) and it was comprised of a collection of anodized aluminum and chromed steel tubular furniture. Le Corbusier's cousin Pierre Jeanneret took Le Corbusier to the exhibition, and not long afterwards Charlotte received an invitation to join Le Corbusier's studio as head of the "furniture equipment" division, at 35 rue de Sèvres to designing furniture and interiors for his architectural projects. Up until this point Le Corbusier's interiors had been furnished simply but without notable modernity - using Thonet bent wood chairs and Maples Club chairs. He wanted to offer a line of furniture that reflected the ideas in his books: "Extensions of our limbs and adapted to human functions that are. Type-needs, type-functions, therefore type-objects and type-furniture. The human-limb object is a docile servant. A good servant is discreet and self-effacing in order to leave his master free. Certainly, works of art are tools, beautiful tools. And long live the good taste manifested by choice, subtlety, proportion and harmony." Speaking of Le Corbusier's philosophy and his studio's ethic, Perriand recalled "The smallest pencil stroke had to have a point, to fulfil a need, or respond to a gesture or posture, and to be achieved at mass-production prices."She brought to the team a perfect sense of balance, and form, a functional understanding of the materials, and the courage to create entirely new, shockingly modern forms. In collaboration with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret Charlotte Perriand designed three chairs for the studio's architectural projects: Perriand posed for the publicity shots of the chaise longue with crossed legs, a daringly short (for the era) skirt and a necklace of industrial ball bearings. 
Seeking a commercial manufacturing company to produce these new pieces Charlotte contacted Peugeot, (at the time they were a bicycle manufacturer) to entreat them to employ their extensive experience manipulating with tubular metal, in the production of modern furniture. Although they declined, Thonet, (famous for bend wood furniture) was persuaded to produce a series of pieces for the 1929 Salon D'Automne. Their exhibit was entitled Equipment d’Habitation (Living Equipment) and presented a model modern apartment in glass and tubular steel. The glass floor was lit from beneath casting light up to the glass ceiling. The chairs all had tubular metal frames and either leather or canvas upholstery and there was a glass topped table with bi plane wingstays for a frame.It was a tremendous success, attracting a great deal of attention. These are the three designs for which she is best known and many summaries of her career stop here, but she was only 24 years old at this point in time, and had a tremendously long, full and creative life ahead of her. The year after her 1929 exhibit Perriand's marriage ended, and she moved to a new attic apartment this time in Montparnasse. In her 1998 autobiography 'Une vie de création' she recalls climbing out of the toilet window of the apartment to exercise on the roof. It was during this period that she met artist Fernand Leger at a reception at the German Embassy in Paris, bored with the event Perriand, Pierre Jenneret, Leger and others left to find a bistro. Some time later she moved apartments and discovered that they were neighbors 'sharing a wall'. It was during the time of the Spanish civil war and two of Charlotte's Spanish friends were staying with her. Leger, Perriand and her guests Jose Luis Sert and Mouncha would breakfast together. "Every day was marvelous; we got together at breakfast each morning, talked a bit, and afterward everyone went off to attend to their affairs. It was an absolutely rich period, a period of exchange, of course, of diverse encounters" Over the next few years she traveled to attend Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) conferences of fellow modernists in Moscow 1930 and 1933 Athens 1933 and continued to develop furniture and fittings for a number of Le Corbusier's architectural projects including the Pavilion Suisse student accommodations at Cité Universitaire in Paris, Salvation Army headquarters in Paris 1932 and even for Le Corbusier’s own new apartment on rue Nungesser-et-Coli. Perriand and Jeanneret again collaborated in 1931 founding the UAM Union des Artistes Modernes where she began to exhibit under her own name.In the 1930's Perriand's work was evolving towards a fusion of modern design and rustic material. A shockingly innovative concept that has been revisited by hundreds of other designers and seems as contemporary today as it no doubt seemed futuristic in the 1930's. She began to work in bamboo and rustic wood and metal and in 1937 she left Le Corbusier’s studio to collaborate with the artist Fernand Léger on a pavilion for the Paris Exhibition and to work on a ski resort in the Savoie region of France (where her grandparents were from) - a project which was to grow and continue into the 1960's. 
The War Years When World War II began in 1939 she left the Savoie and returned to Paris and to found a joint partnership with Jean Prouvé and Pierre Jeanneret (Le Corbusier's colleague and cousin), designing prefabricated aluminum buildings, Until a few months later in 1940 she accepted a position as an advisor to the industrial design Ministry of Trade and Industry in Japan. She recommended that the Japanese turn their efforts to creating products for export to the West, (so far sighted a strategic analysis is truly impressive). Sailing for Japan in she could have had no idea what a tremendous adventure she was embarking upon. Many had expected the war to blow over in months, but instead the hostilities escalated and more and more countries were drawn into the fighting, until in 1942 Perriand was forced to leave Japan as an 'undesirable alien' and enemy of the German allied forces. Naval blockades defending against Japanese naval aggressions blocked her route home, and unable to return to Japan she went to French Indochina, (Vietnam today). Perriand stayed in Vietnam until 1946, marrying again and giving birth to Pernette her daughter. Every the inquisitive technologist, while there she also learned about local materials and crafts weaving, woodwork, rattan and other natural products. The simple balanced Asian aesthetic was a profound influence on her later work, her use of contrast and negative spaces became somewhat Japanese in flavor, and her preference for wood over metal edged a little more towards the rustic, although always innovative and modern. She developed a particular sensitivity for "local conditions" as she put it - the particular culture and vernacular of an environment, believing that it was her role as an interior designer to showcase such specific characteristics as an asset to the whole. After the War When she did finally return to France to once again collaborate with designer Jean Prouve, her career was readily revived and her reputation as an independent designer solidified. She went on to work with Fernand Léger on the design of Hôpital Saint-Lo in 1949, and with Le Corbusier again - designing a prototype kitchen for his Unité d’Habitation apartment building in Marseilles in 1950. In 1951 she organized the French section of the Milan Triennale exhibition, and in 1957 she designed the League of Nations building for the United Nations in Geneva. Working with Le Corbusier again for the last time in 1959 together with the Brazilian architect Lucio Costa - they designed the interior of their Maison du Brésil at Cité Universitaire in Paris. Developing an international reputation she worked with renowned Bauhaus architect Erno Goldfinger in 1960 on the design of the French Tourist Office in London’s Piccadilly and the London office of Air France. Living well into her 90's Charlotte Perriand was alive and well for the 1985 retrospective of her work at des Arts-Décoratifs, in Paris and a 1998 exhibition at the Design Museum in London featuring a washing machine commissioned by the sponsor, Whirlpool, with an imitation cowhide exterior. At these exhibitions full honors were finally given to her for her tremendous contribution to modern furniture design and indeed design in general. At one of her last public interviews Charlotte Perriand said: "The most important thing to realize is that what drives the modern movement is a spirit of enquiry, it’s a process of analysis and not a style, we worked with ideals." and she described her live as "a sincere and constant search for a modern living art." She was one of the only women in the Mid Century Modern era to win for herself the public acclaim that she so richly deserved, a partial victory it is true, given that she is not so well known for the work she did once she left Le Corbusier's studio, but then we all know that history is prone to be just as chauvinistic as Le Corbusier was all those years ago. Yet it is her ceaseless optimism that made her a success. Most people who purchase Le Corbusier furniture today do not know the story of Charlotte Perriand, indeed they probably don't know of her existence, so in honor of her legacy we dedicate this little biography to her spirit and her talent. |
Modern Furniture Designers
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and a chair for sleeping -
