Clever lady

Oh hello! How’s tricks? As is always the case in September, I have a long backlog of pictures from the summer to post. I managed to cram in a lot of culture as it’s pretty much my oxygen, you know? And with winter looming and who knows what, I just wanted to take advantage of things being open. Luckily there’s been a lot of good stuff to see. Me and my fellow culture vulture D went to see the Charlotte Perriand exhibition at the Design Museum last month and were seriously impressed by the seriously impressive Perriand. I have to be honest here, these exhibition posts are so time consuming to write as I want to try and share info about said artist/architect/creative, but it does mean that it can take a really long time before I’m ready to press the publish button. Do you guys find this stuff interesting or am I making things unnecessarily harder for myself? Feedback would be very much appreciated! In the meantime I’m going to cheat, and you can read up more on Charlotte Perriand here.

Still, I guess I have to explain a bit about her here so this post makes sense. So, Perriand was a French designer and architect who was a part of the Modernist movement working from the 1920’s until the end of the 1990’s (!). She applied for work at the Le Corbusier Studio only to be told by the big man himself: "We don’t embroider cushions here.” (insert massive eye roll). But a year later, having seen her installation at Le Salon d’Automne in 1927, where she had recreated the bar area in her own apartment showing her furniture designs (a bit like in the first picture), Le Corbusier asked her to join his studio on the spot (in your face LC!). She, together with Pierre Jeanneret, went on to design the furniture to go with Le Corbuisier’s houses, who was horrified by seeing how his clients would fill his Modernist houses with antique furniture. The gall!

It was clear that these designs would fit the interiors much better.

Maybe you recognise this design of this chair, the Fauteuil Grand Confort? A Perriand classic, that Le Corbusier and Jeanneret got credited for designing, when it actually was all her work alone. Isn’t patriarchy just great?

And here D is trying out a replica IRL. It’s well comfy. And those colours are just delicious. Putting tubular steel on the outside of the seat was a groundbreaking design at the time.

The Chaise Longue Basculante is such a great design; you can lift the seat section up and angle it however you like. Also very comfy, but hard to get out of gracefully, at least at this angle.

It wasn’t clear in this section of the exhibition that this was a replica of an single room apartment that Le Corbusier, Perriand and Jeanneret presented as an installation at the 1929 Salon d’Automne. This was the open plan section looking one way (I didn’t take a pic of the reverse view with the dining area, I thought this was just a section with furniture on show - put together badly 😂). The bathroom and kitchen section is behind the storage units on the left of this picture.

Sterile, n’est pas? It’s crazy to think this was designed nearly 100 years ago. Those guys were so influential, and it’s even crazier to think that architecture and interiors haven’t moved on that much from the Modernist movement. Although personally I’d never choose to sleep right next to the bathroom sink.

On the other side of the wall at the back of the picture above was the kitchen. Apologies for not taking a wide shot here.

I loved this picture from Perriand’s studio in Montparnasse. It just looks so damn cosy. Towards the late 1930’s she turned away from metal manufacturing and started working almost exclusively with wood. She designed the table in that shape as it let you seat more people comfortably than you could do with a rectangular or square table. So clever. Perriand was also very sporty Spice, hence the still rings in the ceiling.

An example of the table in the exhibition, clearly showing how the design of the table legs meant that they weren’t in the way of guests’ legs (I hate when you have to sit with your legs around table legs).

During WW2 she was invited to go and work in Japan, and on the ship on the way over there she spotted this chalk graffiti on the deck, drawn by a Japanese sailor, which impressed her so much…

… that she copied it and enlarged it onto a rug design. As you can see here, her furniture designs had taken on a much more organic form by the early 1940’s.

Love this picture of her messing about.

Some very cool wall lights that you could pivot the angle on. They gave off such a nice light.

And this chair! Wouldn't mind having a couple of them in the house (I wish 💸).

Some Isamu Noguchi rice lamps - from below. Very much looking forward to seeing his exhibition at the Barbican this autumn.

Looking at my pictures now, I realise I skipped so much as I wasn't intending to take pictures of everything to show what was there - here. I just took pics of what I liked the look of. So apologies for an abbreviated representation of all of this. So what is this you may wonder? Well, Perriand designed the ski resorts of Les Arcs 1600, 1800, 1950 and 2000 in the late 1960’s and 70’s. She had the kitchen and bathrooms prefabricated off site, so that they could be craned into position with all the electrics and plumbing all ready to be plugged in. Here’s the kitchen section

and here you can see the bathroom part in it’s own box. I found this film on YouTube that explains a bit more.

Charlotte Perriand was a genius designer and architect, and by the looks of things a great human being too. In her later years she built herself a small chalet in Meribel, and it was my favourite of all the things she created. There were only photographs of it in the exhibition, but have a look here and you’ll see what I mean. So happy we got to find out more about her and her work; I resent how history has always airbrushed women out if it, unless they were royals. Stupid frickin’ patriarchy.