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| 1954 Charlotte Perriand in Japan, source: https://brabbu.com/ |
There are many things about Charlotte Perriand (1903-99) – that she was the principal author of some of the 20th century’s most memorable pieces of furniture, that she could be as inventive with traditional materials such as bamboo as she was with tubular steel, that she could turn her unique hand and eye to furniture, to photographs, to impassioned political photomontages, to a 30,000-bed ski resort. Among the most important is that she believed in “the joy of creating and living”, as she put it, “in this century of ours.”
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| Perriand’s Les Arcs 1600 ski resort, 1968-69. Photo: Pernette Perriand/ © AChP |
The joy of which Perriand spoke was bodily as well as visual or mental, to be found in her love of skiing, in the texture and yield of leather or fabric, in the spaces for physical exercise that she proposed for homes of the future.
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| Inside Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret’s mountain refuge. Photo: Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage |
She based a carpet on an untutored drawing by a sailor she met on a voyage to Japan. If she saw a remarkable piece of wood, a magnificent slice of jacaranda in Brazil, for example, she would design a table to suit it. Her photographs bring out the beauty of driftwood, fish bones and scrap metal, of pieces of ice lifted against the sky.
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| Le refuge Tonneau, 1938 by Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret. Photo: Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage |
Her prefabricated mountain refuge of 1938 – an aluminium-clad polygon with porthole windows – anticipates Stanley Kubrick by several decades. Except that, in about the place where you might meet Hal the computer, you find a dignified but basic bucket, for storing and dispensing water.
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| Charlotte Perriand and chaise longue. Photo: © FLC/ ADAGP, Paris 2019/ AChP |
There is another photograph of Perriand. She is lying on the adjustable chaise longue of 1928, the gracefully revolutionary work of steel, chrome, rubber and fabric that she designed along with Le Corbusier and his cousin and colleague Pierre Jeanneret. It is set to maximum reclining mode, feet higher than head. Perriand is wearing a necklace of ball bearings, a sign of her belief in the beauty of the machine age. Her face turned partly away, she happens not to be smiling in what is a less spontaneous shot than others of her. But it still expresses her fundamental belief – that life, and design, is about “the cultivation of happiness”.
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| Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, source: https://thecharnelhouse.org/ |
“You have to keep your eyes as open as fans,” she told her daughter, Pernette Perriand-Barsac. “Nothing is off the table,” she also said, “there is no single answer.”, making her name as an exponent of the machine age aesthetic, aligned herself with no single style.
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