(1903-1999)

As a culmination to a life that has stretched in parallel with the 20th century, Charlotte Perriand has left to us her memoirs, a vivid testimony of the most significant events of the first moderns. Her first design, the ‘Sous le Toit’ bar, presented in the autumn 1927 Paris exhibition, caught the attention of Le Corbusier and earned her a job in his Rue de Sèvres studio. Here she developed the paradigmatic steel tube chaise longue that would come to symbolize a modern and cosmopolitan lifestyle. Ten years later Perriand set up her own practice, and the outbreak of war found her designing prototypes of prefabricated dwellings with Jean Prouvé and Pierre Blanchon. On invitation of the Japanese trade minister she travelled there as an industrial crafts consultant –the fruit of this visit being a bamboo version of the famous lounger. The postwar years saw her collaborating anew with Le Corbusier, designing among other things a kitchen prototype for the first Unité d’Habitation, though on her own she undertook such works as the Air France offices in London and Tokyo or the apartments of the Arcs hotel and sports complex in Savoie.