A picture showing architect and designer Charlotte Perriand reclining on her Chaise Longue Basculante (1928-29) is widely considered an iconic modernist image.
Yet Perriand, in her trademark bobbed hair and ball bearings necklace, wasn't just acting as a model and demonstrating the function of this piece. Perriand was indeed one of the driving forces behind modernism in design and also the designer (credited with Pierre Jeanneret and his cousin Le Corbusier) of the elegant chaise longue (still produced today by Cassina together with several other designs by Perriand such as the armchair and sofa with leather cushions and a metal frame and the "Ombra" chair).
Perriand was celebrated last year with the exhibition "Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World" at the Fondation Louis Vuitton and she is currently being celebrated also at the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF: 2020) with Stéphane Ghez's documentary "Charlotte Perriand, Pioneer in the Art of Living". Due to Coronavirus the festival was rescheduled online: viewers across the U.S. and Canada can now buy tickets and watch the 17 films part of the virtual programme until December 3 (tickets for individual films and all-access passes are on sale at this link).
The documentary is conceived as a tribute to a woman who had a key role in designing modernity and it is also an inspiring exploration of her principles, ideas and style. Everything for Perriand started from the void.
Born in 1903 in Paris to a tailor and a seamstress working for the haute couture houses, Perriand encountered the void for the first time in her life when, as a child, she was hospitalised to get her appendix out. In the sparsely furnished hospital room, she found a sense of calmness and tranquillity and realised that the void is "all powerful because it can contain everything", it is indeed in the void that the essential resides. After she graduated from the École de L'Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, Perriand started exploring the possibilities of the void also in compact spaces.
Her first explorations into design led her to the creation of a built-in wall bar made of aluminium, glass and chrome and a card table with built-in pool-pocket drink holders - also known as "Bar sous le Toit", that is "bar under the roof", meaning "in the attic". She designed it indeed for a section of her apartment and presented it at the 1927 Salon d'Automne.
At the time Perriand applied to work at Le Corbusier's studio, but the famous architect told the 24-year-old female furniture designer "We don't embroider cushions here". Yet, after seeing her "Bar sous le Toit" at the Salon, Le Corbusier, struck by the modern light-reflecting nickel-plated copper stools, anodised aluminium cocktail bar and chrome-plated table nestled beside a leather banquette and a built-in gramophone cabinet, changed idea.
Perriand was fascinated by modern materials and also designed an ingenious extendable table that could accomodate up to 10 people, it made with materials borrowed from the automotive industry and featured a black rubber surface stretched between chrome runners that would roll out of a box concealing the mechanisms.
Realising Perriand's inventiveness would have been an asset, Le Corbusier asked her to join his and Pierre Jeanneret's studio. Here she became Le Corbusier's director of interior furnishings and from 1927 to 1937, she focused on designing furniture. Perriand benefited from the international environment at Le Corbusier's studio and her experiments soon led her to designing all the steel tube furniture for the iconic Villa Savoye.
In the 1930s Perriand became more active on the social level and helped founding the "Union des Artistes Modernes" (UAM), while, inspired by organic forms and natural materials, she started using more traditional materials such as wood and cane as they were more affordable. In 1936 she took part in the Households Arts Show where she presented a photomontage entitled "The Poverty of Paris" in which she raised awareness about the conditions of the people living in housing estates that had become urban prisons and realised that architects had to work to give people comfortable good houses. This concept was developed in a project revolving around the creation of 150 sq. feet-per-resident units designed around the idea of the void with all the objects needed integrated within the storage walls. This became the cornerstone of her work and was used for projects with Le Corbusier, such as the dorm rooms at the Cité Universitaire de Paris.
Perriand also became a pioneer of the society of leisure, designing functional and flexible weekend houses and mountain shelters such as the "barrel refuge", an octagonal aluminium-clad cylindrical capsule with a warm wooden interior.
At the 1937 Paris Exposition Perriand worked again with Le Corbusier, but also with her friend Fernand Léger, with UAM and with a group of communist architects. The exposition marked the end of her collaboration with Le Corbusier and, after working for a while with Jean Prouvé, Perriand went to Japan.
The local art, architecture, philosophy and lifestyle had a huge impact on her: she travelled for four months visiting art schools, factories, potters, silk painters and bamboo artists. Forced into Vietnamese exile because of the war, she returned to France only in 1946.
The post-war reconstruction allowed her to put into practice the studies about the 150 sq. feet-per-resident units at the Cité Radieuse, Marseille, designed by Le Corbusier, and later on in her life at Les Arcs, a ski resort in Savoie, France, designed in the 1970s by a group of architects led by Perriand to house 30,000 visitors at a time. For Les Arcs she looked at nature and developed a series of terraces incorporated in the side of the mountain that become invisible when covered in snow. For this project Perriand also developed fibreglass bathroom pods that could be made off-site.
In the 1950s, she designed the Tunisia and Mexico bookcases, storage systems that anticipated the assembly-ready furniture as they offered consumers a DIY approach to design and, in 1955, she returned to Tokyo. Here she continued her researches about the synthesis of the arts, such as her "resonances", creations born out of the encounter with the Japanese culture, like her "Ombra" chair, inspired by the concept of the void, but also by the invisibility of the Bunraku puppet masters or her Chaise Longue Basculante recreated in bamboo. Japan also inspired one of her last projects, a sanctuary-like teahouse originally commissioned in 1993 by UNESCO as part of the Japanese Cultural Festival.
The portrait that comes out of Ghez's documentary is that of a free-spirited and politically engaged woman who had a passion for pushing the boundaries of modern design, an extraordinary energy and a great sensibility. Perriand was a revolutionary mind and a genuinely exceptional figure.
One of the best pictures of Perriand portrays her standing topless on the mountains, back to the camera, arms raised, almost a symbolical gesture of liberation from the socio-cultural constraints affecting women in their careers and preventing them from achieving their goals.
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