The legacy of designer Charlotte Perriand
October 1, 2021
At the 1927 Salon d’Automne, one design caused a sensation for sweeping away all the trends that came before it. The ‘Bar sous le toit’ (‘Bar under the roof’), a cocktail bar made of aluminium, chrome and glass, embraced the machine age and rejected the fussy, decorative past. Its creator had short-cropped hair and wore a necklace made of steel ball bearings to show her love for modernity.
Her name was Charlotte Perriand. She was just 24 years old and had applied to work at Le Corbusier’s studio. He rejected her, saying “we don’t embroider cushions here”. But when he saw her installation at the Salon d’Automne, he realised his mistake and hired her immediately.
Perriand was one of the visionaries behind Le Corbusier’s iconic LC7 swivel armchair in 1927 (based on Perriand’s own design), the LC4 Chaise Longue in 1929 and LC2 Armchair in 1929. While Le Corbusier came up with the ideas, it was his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and Perriand who made the designs a reality.
Perriand left Le Corbusier's studio in 1937 to pursue her own independent work. She returned to her chaise longue design during a trip to Japan in 1941, recreating it in locally sourced bamboo. It helped her to bridge the East-West design divide. “It allowed me to demonstrate to the Japanese that bamboo could be used in Occidental forms - at that time, everything in Japan was entirely Japanese. For them, this was an entirely Western application of a very familiar material,” she said later.
Perriand returned to France in 1946, after a six-year stay in Asia. She began using more natural materials, like wood and bamboo, and her designs grew from seating to include desks, coffee tables, lighting and interior design. Together with designer Jean Prouvé, Perriand created the Nuage modular bookshelves and room dividers. She paired her furniture with paintings by Fernand Léger and paper lanterns by Isamu Noguchi.
In her sixties and at the peak of her career, Perriand designed the Les Arcs, a sprawling ski resort in the French Alps. She made sure that the rental apartments were both high quality yet affordable, and all the kitchens were open-plan so that the family can cook and relax together. The resort is still open for holiday-makers and has been awarded the ‘20th Century Heritage’ label by the French Ministry of Culture.
Perriand’s life and works have been celebrated in two recent exhibitions at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Design Museum in London. But you only need to scroll through a mid-century inspired furniture website, and you will see a shadow of her ground-breaking designs.
Image credits:
Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier holding a plate like a halo in the background, 1928. Credit: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021 / © AChP via CNN.com
LC4 armchair. Photo by Christopher Söhngen. CC BY-SA 4.0
Chaise longue in bamboo by Charlotte Perriand (Musée du Quai Branly). Photo by dalbera. CC BY 2.0
Nuage bookshelf from UAM: Union des Artistes Modernes exhibition (Centre Pompidou, Paris). Photo by dalbera. CC BY 2.0