Charlotte Perriand
Charlotte Perriand was born on October 24, 1903, in Paris, France, to a tailor and a seamstress, and spent childhood summers in the mountainous Savoy region with her paternal grandparents, a landscape she would return to throughout her life. Her drawing abilities caught the attention of her junior-high art teacher, and at her mother’s urging she enrolled at the École de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in 1920, studying under Art Deco interior designer Henri Rapin until 1925. She supplemented her education by attending lectures given by Maurice Dufrêne, studio director of La Maîtrise workshop at the Galeries Lafayette, and her schoolwork was selected for display at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. In 1926 she married her first husband, Percy Kilner Scholefield, and converted their attic apartment into a machine-age interior. Following her separation from Scholefield in 1930, she later married Jacques Martin while in wartime exile in Vietnam, and their daughter Pernette was born in 1944 and would work alongside her mother for over 25 years. Perriand died in Paris on October 27, 1999, three days after her 96th birthday.
Perriand’s Bar sous le Toit, an installation of tubular steel, nickel, and glass presented at the 1927 Salon d’Automne, established her as a talent to watch and convinced Le Corbusier to hire her after he had initially dismissed her, telling her “We don’t embroider cushions here.” From 1927 to 1937 she worked in Le Corbusier’s atelier alongside his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, a collaboration she described as “three fingers on one hand,” and together they designed three landmark chairs in 1928: the siège à dossier basculant, known as the LC1, the Fauteuil Grand Confort, known as LC2 and LC3, and the LC4 chaise longue, all still produced today by the Italian firm Cassina, which credits all three designers. She left Le Corbusier’s studio in 1937 to collaborate with painter Fernand Léger and pursue more egalitarian, populist design, helping found the Union des Artistes Modernes and shifting toward affordable materials like wood and cane. She left France for Japan in 1940 as an industrial design advisor to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and was later forced into wartime exile in Vietnam, where she studied woodwork and weaving and developed a lasting engagement with East Asian design. After returning to France in 1946, she resumed her collaboration with Jean Prouvé, designed kitchens for Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, remodeled Air France offices internationally, and designed the League of Nations building for the United Nations in Geneva. Her largest and final project, the ski resort of Les Arcs in Savoy, spanned from 1967 to 1985 and united her lifelong interests in prefabrication, standardization, and the mountain landscape of her youth.
Perriand’s early work embraced the machine age with glistening steel, chrome, and nickel surfaces devoid of pattern or soft materials, a deliberate break from the École’s preference for handcrafted objects in exotic woods. Her design philosophy held that better living spaces created a better society, articulated in her belief in “the art of dwelling” as an extension of living in harmony with human needs and environment. Her later work, especially after her encounters with Japanese and Vietnamese craft traditions, incorporated natural materials like wood, bamboo, and cane, softening her machine-age aesthetic into something more attuned to landscape, craft, and human comfort.
Key Influences
- LC Furniture Collection: Her collaboration with Le Corbusier and Jeanneret on the LC1, LC2, LC3, and LC4 produced some of the most iconic furniture designs of the 20th century, still in production today.
- Machine Age Aesthetic: Her Bar sous le Toit demonstrated that steel, previously a material used primarily by men, could become a primary medium of modern decorative design.
- East-West Synthesis: Her years in Japan and Vietnam introduced natural materials and craft sensibilities into her practice, shaping a distinctly cross-cultural strand of French modernism.
- Les Arcs: Her ski resort project combined prefabrication and standardization with deep sensitivity to mountain landscape, representing the culmination of her lifelong design philosophy.
- Union des Artistes Modernes: Her role in founding the organization helped shift French design toward accessibility and egalitarian ideals, moving decisively beyond the luxury clientele of her early career.
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