A review for STIRworld of the Design Museum's comprehensive retrospective of the pioneering French designer, which also ponders its limited engagement with her experience as a female designer navigating a very male world.
For years, Charlotte Perriand’s reputation rested on the tubular-steel furniture she designed with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in the late 1920s. Two of these pieces are indisputable icons of the machine age. The Fauteuil grand confort, that universal ornament of corporate lobbies, encloses users in a rigid yet relaxing cage of steel and down-filled cushions. The Chaise longue basculante is even more striking, a zigzag of leather suspended on an arc of chrome. Their elegance, and price tags, encapsulate modernism’s flawed mission to sweep away bourgeois clutter and culture.
In 1927, then 24-year-old Perriand was turned away from Le Corbusier’s Paris studio with a harsh “We don’t embroider cushions here”. She asserted her talent at that year’s Salon d’Automne exhibition – her open-plan Bar sous le toit was a glamorous reproduction of a corner of her loft apartment in the Latin Quarter, complete with its built-in aluminium bar, chrome-plated gaming table and tubular-steel stools. This concoction in glass and metal has been reconstructed at London’s Design Museum, alongside the apartment’s dining area, featuring mirrored cabinets, an extendable table and swivelling bent-metal chairs, the latter still in production today. Le Corbusier, unable to match the radical furniture emanating from the Bauhaus, rapidly backtracked, inviting Perriand to design “interior equipment” for his practice.
Remaining at Le Corbusier’s studio for a decade – its sole woman – Perriand brought new ideas and forms to its furniture, as Le Corbusier acknowledged. The exhibition is a delightful opportunity to see original production drawings, manufacturing plans, prototypes and more, alongside the finished pieces. Questions around respective design contributions are largely side-stepped, but the inclusion of Perriand’s extensive sketchbooks gives a clear indication of her pivotal role. She also engaged in the studio’s wider creative practice, with an increasing focus on modular open plans and social improvement, in keeping with concerns emanating from Germany around existenzminimum, the provision of space-efficient, affordable dwellings to address the housing crisis. Displayed here are Perriand’s studies for workers’ apartments incorporating reconfigurable modules and sliding partitions to provide living space during the day and bedrooms at night. She also designed a range of affordable furniture intended for, but never achieving, mass-production – despite her belief that design should benefit those of modest means, the bulk of the studio’s projects reached only a rich clientele ....
You can read the whole piece at STIRworld here.