CHARLOTTE

PERRIAND
An Art of Living
ESSAYS BY ROGER AUJAME ESTHER DA COSTA MEYER MARY McLEOD JOANOCKMAN ARTHUR RUEGG DANILO UDOVICKI-SELB YASUSHl ZENNO

Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, in association with The Architectural League of New York

Diana Murphy DESIGNER: Miko McGinty PRODUCTION MANAGER: Maria Pia Gramaglia EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Jon Cipriaso
EDITOR:

Texts copyright Q 2003 the authors Compilation copyright Q 2003 Mary McLeod and The Architectural League of New York Published in 2003 by Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, New York. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in Japan

PAGE 2

C H A R L O T T E P E R R I A N D . EspaceB vivre.

Apartment, Paris. 1970

Support for this book has been provided by Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; the J. Clawson Mills Fund of The Architectural League of New York; the New York State Council on the Arts; the Sterling Currier Fund; and Columbia University.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Charlotte Perriand : an art of living / edited by Mary McLeod ;essays by Roger Aujame . . . [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8109-4503-7 1. Perriand, Charlotte-Criticism and interpretation. 2, Interior decoration-FranceHistory-20th century. I. Title: Art of living. II. McLeod, Mary. Ill. Aujame, Roger.

Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 100 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10011 www.abramsbooks.com Abrams is a subsidiary of

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New Designs for Living

Domestic Equipment of Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret, 1928-29
M A R Y McLEOD

When Charlotte Perriand joined Le Corbusier's office in 1927 at the age of twenty-four, she had already achieved considerable renown as a talented, innovative designer. Her Bar in the Attic (Bar sous le toit), which she originally designed for her own apartment, was an instant success at the 1927 Salon d'Automne (see da Costa Meyer, figs. 10, 1 1). Gay and festive, with brightly colored leather cushions and shiny streamlined surfaces, it suggested a sophisticated melange of casual bohemianism and chic luxury-an urbane domestic space in which to relax with friends, one that wittily spurned the stiff propriety of the bourgeois salon. Stylistically, it was a departure not only from French Art Deco but also from the simple wooden forms of Francis Jourdain and of Perriand's younger colleagues Etienne Kohlmann and Georges Djo-Bourgeois. Critics lavishly praised Perriand's Bar in the Attic. For example, noting the paradox of a bar in an attic apartment, Rene Chavance wrote: "But what a pretty mansard! . . . One cannot imagine anything fresher or more youthful."' It would appear that this young, attractive designer was about to embark on a highly successful, independent career. Instead, the exhibition brought on a personal crisis. Only two years out of school, Perriand felt that she was at an impasse; she had achieved success in the Salons, along the lines prescribed by her teachers Henri Rapin and Maurice Dufrene, but "without a program, without a project." She even considered leaving design to study agriculture at the Ecole Grignon. Alarmed, her friend the jewelry designer Jean Fouquet lent her Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture and L'Art

dkcoratif d'aujourd'hui. These books, Perriand explained, "opened the wall before my eyes." She was now determined to work with Le Corbusier and went to his studio to ask for a job. Le Corbusier's initial response was hardly encouraging, but the next day he visited Perriand's stand at the Salon d'Automne and decided to hire her on the spot. By the end of October, she was working in his atelier on the Rue de SBvres as "an associate in charge of interior equipment." At that time, the office was still small, consisting only of Le Corbusier, his partner (and cousin) Pierre

Jeanneret, and Swiss architect Alfred Roth. Soon they would be joined by two Japanese, Kunio Maekawa and Junzo Sakakura (fig. 1); a Yugoslavian, Ernst Weissmann; and an American, Norman Rice.3 No one was paidat least not regularly. Perriand also continued to work independently and, in addition, received support from her husband, a prosperous older Englishman, who paid for her private architecture lessons with R ~ t h . ~ The nature of the collaboration among Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Jeanneret has been the subject of some debate. Why did he hire a graduate from the Union Centrale des

FIG 1

Perr~and, Kun~o Maekawa, and an unidentified thrrd person at Le Corbus~er and Pierre Jeanneret's atel1928 ler. Par~s.

Arts D6coratifs when he so adamantly disapproved of French academic training? What role did Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Jeanneret each play in their collaborative designs? How did Le Corbusier change the direction of Perriand's work, and how, in turn, did she influence his architecture? What effect did contemporary social attitudes and modes of production have on their ideas? Was Perriand's identity as a woman-a New Woman-a factor in their approach to residential design? And more generally, how did their vision of the modern domestic interior help shape attitudes both within and outside the French design community? When Perriand joined the atelier, Le Corbusier already held clearly defined attitudes about furniture. He believed that furniture should be "equipmentn-functional, efficient, and standardized, as anonymous and versatile as his Purist objets-types.5 His models were American office furniture, Innovation trunks, and Roneo metal file cabinets. With this polemical stance he rejected his own formative education and early practice. He had been trained in a decorative-arts school, had selected and designed furniture for his Swiss clients in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and in 1912 even wrote a small book assessing the state of contemporary German and French decorative arts6 But in the early 1920s, he repudiated the entire field of the decorative arts, and in 1924 he wrote a series of articles in his and Am6d6e Ozenfant's journal L'Esprit nouveau attacking its tenacious adherence to pseudo-historical styles and its failure to address modern needs. These were reprinted the following year in his book L'Art decoratif d'aujourd'hui, which so influenced Perriand in 1927. Here he denigrated the role of women as both producers and consumers of design, criticizing them for perpetuating a nineteenthcentury craft mentality and for lacking an overall sense of order. He believed that the male ensembliers (the designers of sets of furniture for spaces conceived as artistic totalities) understood the need for unity and organization, although he disapproved of their flamboyant use of vivid colors and exotic materials.' His choice of the word equipement, as opposed to mobilier (furniture), underscored his break with this tradition. As he later explained, "the term 'furniture' implies to me something vague, disorderly, and a multitude

of other sins, whereas the term 'equipment' designates efficiency and real and exact function^."^ Le Corbusier divided domestic equipment itself into two categories: movable pieces (meubles) and storage. Adolf Loos had made a similar distinction, but he believed (as Le Corbusier did initially) that some existing models could serve the needs of seating and the architect need only design built-in storage units. In both cases, traditional craft techniques were sufficient. Le Corbusier went further, insisting that both furniture and storage components (casiers, literally "pigeonholes") should be industrially produced and that their design was the task of a technical expert. The architect's role was simply "to establish order and proportion." "Architecture," he declared, "does not [need to] addmVQ Why, then, did Le Corbusier decide to hire a furniture designer, especially a woman designer, in 1927? There were probably several reasons. First, it should be noted that Le Corbusier was often forced to go against his own conception of the architect as ordonnateur. Although he had furnished the interiors of his Esprit Nouveau pavilion of 1925 to look as if they consisted only of serially produced objets-types, many of the components (some borrowed from the Villa La Roche) were designed by him. The modular storage units, the "factory" windows, the streamlined bicycle-tube stair, and the tables with nickeled tubular-steel legs were all custom manufactured. As his practice grew, and as he became increasingly involved in competitions and urban issues, he opted to rely on an "expert" for these aspects of design rather than continue his own somewhat primitive efforts. By 1927, he had also become frustrated with the market's failure to generate prototypes for mass production. Despite his constant demands on industry to take action-or perhaps because these demands were purely rhetorical-little progress had occurred in the mass production of residential components since World War I. The furniture that was serially produced and sold in the French department stores was typically overburdened with historicist details or stylized Deco forms. The widespread influence of American ideas, such as Taylorism and Fordism, had had little impact on either actual industrial production or the postwar ethos of cultural conservatism,

in which themes of classicism and national tradition outweighed any impetus for largescale innovation. France had no equivalent to Germany's Standard-Mobel, which was fabricating Marcel Breuer's early tubular-steel designs. Le Corbusier came to the conclusion that if he wanted viable prototypes, his own atelier would have to generate them. Undoubtedly, recent developments at the Bauhaus and in German and Dutch architecture circles also spurred Le Corbusier to action. By 1925, Breuer had developed his famous Wassily chair, and by 1927 Mart Stam and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had designed their cantilevered side chairs. Even in France, tubular steel began to show up occasionally in the decorative-arts magazines and annual Salons by that time. Pierre Chareau, Djo-Bourgeois, Rene Herbst, Maurice Matet, Perriand, Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, and Louis Sognot had all designed metal furniture.I0 The humble Thonet bentwood chairs that Le Corbusier had been using to furnish his villas must have looked quaint and somewhat outmoded beside these overtly mechanistic designs. Moreover, the openness and lightness of the new metal furniture accentuated the sense of spatial flow so important to Le Corbusier and the German designers. The immediate impetus, however, was his recent experience at the Weissenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart, a large-scale outdoor exhibition in 1927 sponsored by the Deutsche Werkbund and intended to demonstrate the possibilities of serial construction of housing. The exhibition, which was titled Die Wohnung and directed by Mies van der Rohe, consisted of twenty-one buildings by seventeen architects, including an apartment block by Mies, row housing by J. J. P. Oud and Stam, and various freestanding houses, including two by Le Corbusier and Jeanneret. The Germans presented elegant and accomplished interiors, while Le Corbusier, overwhelmed with the controversy surrounding the League of Nations competition, had considerable difficulty completing the furnishings for his houses. Roth, who was supervising their construction in Stuttgart, recounted that Le Corbusier kept promising to send him furniture designs and interior details, but nothing ever came.' At the last minute, Roth himself pieced together the interiors, which

'

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND

37

FIG 7

LE C O R B U S I E R A N D P I E R R E J E A N N E R E T .

Gallerj space In Villa La Roche. Pans. c a 1925

FIC, 3

The same space w ~ t h Perr~and's nevi 'equlpmer1t.1928. The cha~se longue In i h ~ s publlc~ty photograph was added for the shoot; La Roche d ~ not d own one.

looked admittedly less polished than Mies van der Rohe's and Lilly Reich's model apartments. In addition, Le Corbusier was severely criticized by some of the Germans for the inefficiency of his kitchens. Erna Meyer, a leading proponent of domestic reform (and the designer with Oud of a kitchen in the Weissenhof exhibition), complained to Mies: "I was disappointed by Le Corbusier most of all! What happened to all the principles in his book? Is this what he meant by the engineer's aesthetic?"' Perriand offered expertise in these domains, as well as an original modern sensibility that must have appealed to Le Corbusier. Although her training at the Union Centrale had been fairly conventional-the training of an "upholsterer," as she put iti3-students were encouraged to examine the details of furniture and its functional requirements.14 Also, as her Bar in the Attic revealed, she had already demonstrated her skill in domestic arrangements in her own apartment in Paris, which she renovated herself. Perriand had never displayed a kitchen or bath of her own design (and such displays were still relatively rare in the French decorative-arts salons), but Le Corbusier may also have felt that a woman would be more capable of handling those design problems-not an unnatural assumption, in light of common stereotypes and the dominance of women in domestic reform at the time.15 As her first assignments in the office, Perriand quickly tackled two problems already on the drawing boards: redesigning the interior fittings of the gallery space of the Villa La Roche in Paris (figs. 2, 3) and developing a series of furniture pieces that could be used in the La Roche and other interiors. However, her first major project after joining the atelier was another independent exhibition space: a dining room to be displayed at the Salon des Artistes Dkcorateurs in April 1928 and presented solely in her name. Like her Bar in the Attic, the Salle a manger 1928 (as she called it) again used components from her own apartment. Elements of this design would soon become part of the atelier's standard repertoire.16 More important, she began to develop an image of modern living that would profoundly influence the work of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret.

The 1928 Dining Room

Perriand saw the dining room that she exhibited in 1928 as part of a broader collective endeavor. While her objectives for the project echoed many of the principles of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, in presenting it at the Salon, she allied herself with two young interior designers, Herbst and Djo-Bourgeois, and two jewelry designers, Fouquet and G6rard Sandoz.17 The group decided to place their displays together at the Grand Palais to produce what Perriand called a "unified shock." Herbst, who had been designing metal furniture since 1926, presented a smoking room, and Djo-Bourgeois showed a living room and kitchen (figs. 4, 5). Like Perriand, they used tubular-steel furniture, kept the walls and ceilings bare, and incorporated large glazed openings, which flooded their displays with light. Herbst's room was the most playful, furnished with somewhat mannered, vividly upholstered chairs and a bold geometric rug. Djo-Bourgeois's living room was more subdued: a spacious doubleheight room, the primary decorative note being the geometric curtains and wool rugs designed by his wife, Elise Djo-Bourgeois. He called it a "Living Room," suggesting a more comfortable, relaxed space for family life than the traditional French salon.18 Against one wall he placed a modern, clean-lined sofa, a piece of furniture that recalled English and American homes. The most radical room in the four-room display was Djo-Bourgeois's kitchen, which had a decidedly clinical air. With its white enameled fixtures and tiles, exposed water heater, laboratory stool, and bare light bulbs, it differed dramatically from the cheerful, decorative displays promoted by the department stores (fig. 6). It was ignored by the French decorative-arts magazines.lg Perriand's dining room struck a happy compromise between her two colleagues' displays. It was at once functional and elegant, original without being too bohemian; the predictable chicness of her 1927 exhibit (bars were "A la mode," as Chavance noted) had disappeared in this confident vision of modern life. The room featured an extendable dining table placed against one wall, four swivel dining chairs, a long buffet with three sliding glass panels, and, next to a large glass wall, a small round glass table with two swivel stools

FIG 4

GEORGES DJO-BOURGEOIS. Living Room.

Salon des Artistes Decorateurs, Paris. 1928. The curtains and rugs were designed by Elise Djo-Bourgeois.

(figs. 7, 8; pl. 4). There were two additional stools: one from her 1927 bar with an upholstered cushion supported on a base of two crossing nickeled-copper planes; and a new one with a woven fabric seat stretched across two tubular-steel rods connected to curved supports. A large square column adjacent to the dining-table wall was mirrored; the other column and walls were painted various colors, eliminating the tapestries or wallpaper that were de rigueur in most of the Salon displays. Potted trees, vases of flowers, a wicker basket, a bowl of fruit, and an African mask provided lyrical counterpoints to the hard, clean surfaces. With this exhibit, Perriand began to define more assertively her concept of the modern interior. Although functionalism had always been a part of her decorative-arts training, it now took on a more visible and polemical edge. The table's black rubber surface and the terrazzolith floor permitted easy cleaning; the built-in linear buffet provided storage for dishes and a plate warmer, minimizing clutter; and a shelf above the table accommodated wine and sewing platters, facilitating, as critics noted, sewice in a sewantless household.

C H A R L O T T E PERRIC\t4D

39

FIG

GEORGES DJO-BOURGEOIS. Kitchen.Salon des Artlstes Decorateurs. Paris. 1928

F I G e.

M A U R I C E DUFRENE. Kitchen. Salon des Artlstes Decorateurs, Paris. 1926. Produced by La Maitrise (Galeties Lafayefie)

Her furniture designs were also more emphatically industrial in their aesthetic. With the exception of two small, earlier pieces (the stool and round glass table from the Bar in the Attic), she dispensed with the nickeled and alum~num surfaces of her 1927 display and their stylized, slightly Deco profiles, and instead used tubular-steel supports and clean, geometric lines.20A new component here was mobility: her dining chairs and fourlegged stools turned; the table could be extended to double its size; and there were sliding panels on the buffet. Mobility had been a constant theme in Le Corbusier's earlier publications, as can be seen in the American office chairs and camp furniture illustrated in L'Esprit nouveau. Perriand's new mechanical sophistication, however, did not preclude comfort or even humor. This is apparent in the swivel chair (siege tournant), which was inspired by an office desk chair (pl. 5). Thin tubular-steel supports held plump coral-colored round cushions; what touched the body was soft and not machine-made. This creaturelike chair vaguely suggested a Michelin Man propped up on four spidery legs. While functionalism and the use of metal were important elements of the group's manifesto, just as important was the more impressionistic objective of creating a fresh and youthful environment that addressed the exigencies of modern life. Perriand's linenless dining table, swivel chairs, plain white plates, and Nicolas wine glasses conveyed an image of relaxed conviviality, suggesting a new integration of service and sociability that dispensed with bourgeois formalities and needless domestic labor. Even in comparison to other modernist displays in the Salon, such as the country house of her teacher Maurice ) ,the group's bold declaration Dufrkne (fig. 9 of a new kind of home and family life stood out as innovative. This social objective was widely recognized in the contemporary press. In the middleof-the-road review L'Architecture, Pierre Olmer labeled the group's effort "extreme left" and explicitly noted that he was intentionally

FIG 7

CHARLOTTE P E R R I A N D . 1928 Dlnlng Room,

with the extendable table, bu~lt-ln buffet, and a stool des~gned in 1927. Salon des Artistes Decorateurs, Par~s. 1928

FIG B (OPPOSITE\

V~ew of the 1928 Din~ng Room, show~ng Perriand's new tubular-steel stools and a nickled table from 1927. The glass wall recalls the facade of Perriand's attic apartment on Place Sa~nt-Sulp~ce.
FIG 9 (RIGHT)

M A U R I C E D U F R E N E . Din~ng Areain acountry

House. Salon des Art~stes Decorateurs, Par~s. 1928

using political jargon to emphasize its audacity in confronting future conditions. While there was a strong note of ambivalence in his largely favorable review, most commentators celebrated their innovations. The critic of the Journal de I'ameublement praised the three designers as an avant-garde who responded to the needs of contemporary life, and Marcel Valotaire in the English magazine The Studio prominently displayed a full-page image of Perriand's dining room, noting more generally: "Perhaps never before have I so definitely experienced the feeling of entering a new world, of a breaking with narrow traditions, be they never [sic] so respectable, of a window open to the future. The motor-car, the aeroFIG 1 0

ods of quiet and r e p ~ s e . " ~ The ' fact that the model room was designed by a woman-one who wore boldly patterned clothes, a necklace of steel ball bearings, and her hair a la garqonne (fig. 10)-dramatically underscored the projected revolution in lifestyle. This was not a dining room for a traditional femme au foyer. The press was equally enthusiastic about the room's ambiance and style. Unlike Le Corbusier's Esprit Nouveau pavilion three years earlier, which had been criticized for its mechanistic sobriety, Perriand's design was praised for its appealing a t m ~ s p h e r eIn .~~ Mobilier et dkcoration, Gabriel Henriot concluded his review of the show by calling the group's display "the freshest, the most original and the most successful in the Salon." Paradoxically, what seems to have won over even those commentators skeptical of modernism's austerity or its projected new lifestyle was Perriand's elegance, playful wit, and pleasure in detail-her attention to what might be seen as traditional feminine attributes. For example, in Art et decoration H.-A. Martinie wrote, "The dining room of Charlotte Perriand would charm a Brillat-Savarin of 1928 in its gaiety, its comforts so well disposed for pleasant dining and good company." 'The furnishings," he added, "are an especially ingenious and charming solution to the problems of

Perriand in her attlc apartment in Paris. 1928

plane and wireless have in a few years revolutionised the material conditions of life. Grave social questions-home life, housing, the position of women, have altered our customs. And this time the artists have not remained outside the movement; they have progressed with it and sometimes have even gone beyond it." The women's household magazines also heralded the group's innovations. Maisons pour tous featured Perriand's dining room on its cover, and in the lead article Guy de Brummel described the project as a successful solution to an "active, sportive existence, increasingly deprived of long peri-

C H A R L O T T E PERRIAFID

43

organization, which preoccupy all mistresses of the house." Again and again critics used words such as "gaiety," "youth," and "charm," in their reviews; in short, the display seduced its audie n ~ eFemininity-recast . ~ ~ in bold, amusing, and modern terms-had helped ease the way for a more revolutionary agenda. Although the assumption that women were "mistresses of the house" still reigned, the possibility that those women might also work, engage in sports, and have busy, active lives was now embodied in Perriand's striking design.

Three Tubular-Steel Chairs

Shortly after the 1928 exhibition, Perriand finalized the designs of the three chairs for which the atelier is famous: the siege a dossier basculant (chair with a swinging back), the fauteuil grand confort (easy chair), and the chaise longue. Le Corbusier had proclaimed the chair a "machine-for-sitting" but had stressed that such machines should accommodate different body positions. In furnishing the Esprit Nouveau pavilion, he had

chosen Thonet bentwood chairs for dining and work, and club chairs for relaxation; his objective now was to analyze different seating conditions and to find the appropriate prototype for each. Already in 1926 he had determined that the new meubles serviteurs should be lower than traditional chairs, following the precedent of "club chairs, deck chairs, and automobile seats"; as he explained, "Etiquette has changed. One notices that we now have stretched legs. Women, please excuse us; you came first." The next year, Le Corbusier began sketching different seating postures, and in Prgcisions (1 930) he published a drawing that showed seven states of them, including worwdining, conversation, lecturing, and relaxing (fig. 1 Following his lead, Perriand pursued similar studies (fig. 12). In tracing the various contributions to this collaborative effort, it is difficult (and probably a mistake) to assign authorship. Perriand credited Le Corbusier for setting the design parameters and for suggesting the basic form of their furniture.25She worked out with Jeanneret the designs and full-scale details, which Le Corbusier would then sometimes

FIG t 1

FIG i ?

LE CORBUSIER. Sketch of seven seating

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND. Photomontage

positions, published in Prkc~sions (1 930)

illustrat~ng d~fferent seating positions. Ca. 1929

refine; but she took charge of their execution herself. In her autobiography, she described with some delight the story of fabricating the first prototypes. Apparently, Le Corbusier was becoming increasingly impatient that furniture designs were not progressing beyond the drawing boards. She decided to take the matter into her own hands and assembled the prototypes in her studio apartment. She rurnmaged through hardware stores and department stores in search of materials and fittings, went to furriers for pony skin and calfskin, and arranged for Labadie, a metalworker in the Saint-Antoine district who had helped her make her earlier furniture, to fabricate the tubular-steel frameworks. One evening, she invited Le Corbusier and Jeanneret over to her apartment on Place Saint-Sulpice and surprised them with her finished pieces. Le Corbusier was delighted and amused, exclaiming, " 1 1 s sont coquets."26In 1932, he credited Perriand for having "the sole responsibility for the execution of all our domestic

equipment," and over the years, he regularly acknowledged her role in the firm's work.*' While Le Corbusier described the typical work chair as an "instrument of torture that keeps you admirably awake," he envisioned the siege a dossier basculant as a chair in which to sit for living-room conversation (fig.

FIG 13

LE CORBUSIER-JEANNERET-PERRIAND.

Two versions of the skge a doss~er basculant, one In calfskin and the other In canvas. 1928
FIG 1 4

MARCEL B R E U E R . Wass~ly chair. Chrome-plated tubular steel and canvas. 1925

13; pl. 9). He noted that "I sit down to chat:

certain armchairs gives me a decent and polite position."28The Le Corbusier partnership often adapted traditional motifs and combined natural and industrial materials to create a modern rendition of a long-established type. This chair is a reworking of the colonial or British officer's chair, with the four wooden legs refashioned in tubular steel, the seats and backs in tautly stretched calfskin, wool, or unbleached canvas, and the single-strap leather armrests replaced with tightly sprung looped leather straps.29In its separation of structure and body support, in its lightness and its mechanistic aesthetic, the chair also recalls Breuer's Wassily chair (fig. 14), but

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND

45

with notable differences in scale and elaboration. The dimensions of the siege a dossier basculant suggest a female occupant or a slender man, while it is easy to imagine a big executive sitting in Breuer's wider, more mannered model. From a technical standpoint, the partnership's use of materials in this chair was not particularly innovative. In contrast to the recent Dutch and German cantilevered chairs, which featured continuous tubing that exploited the malleability and resilience of steel, the basculant consists of numerous hand-welded members and it still stands on four legs. Anthropomorphic and metaphorical, it lacks the material economy and continuity of It line of Mies's elegant MR chair of 1927.30 also has its functional shortcomings: a wrong move by the sitter activates the pivoting back-

rest, with surprisingly painful consequences. Here, as was so often the case in Le Corbusier's architecture, symbolic associations and formal continuities were more important than technology or function. The fauteuil grand confort, in contrast to the siege a dossier basculant, is a machinefor-relaxing (fig. 15; pl. 10). Squat and plush, it is a modern translation of the overstuffed easy chair in a club or a gentleman's library. It consists of five bulging leather cushions, secured-indeed, squeezed-by a tubularsteel frame. This innovative design, with its exposed frame, inverts the usual relationship between frame and upholstery in traditional easy chairs (as well as in Perriand's own swivel dining chair), while still offering the essence of luxuriant comfort. The chair was

FIG 15

LE CORBUSIER-JEANNERET-PERRIAND.

Fauteuil grand confort, large version. 1928

made in two sizes, suggesting that both men and women of a wide range of body types could enjoy its enveloping pleas~res.~' None of the sachlich German designers had yet successfully dealt with the issue of comfort. Breuer had called the Wassily a "club" chair, but, unlike the partnership's model, it is not a chair one can curl up in. The grand confort also has a somewhat comic air-a quality Perriand recognized when she described it as a cushioned basket (panier a coussins). But this chair, too, had flaws: the cushions were originally stuffed with down, causing the sitter to sink too low, sometimes squashing the cushions below the outer frame; and getting up out of it was difficult. In 1965, Perriand proposed foam stuffing for Cassina's new version of it.32

The serpentine chaise longue addresses another aspect of relaxation (fig. 16, pls. 1 1, 12). It permits different reclining positions, with the weight of the human body fixing the chosen angle of inclination, and since its inception it has been widely praised for its comfort.33 The occupant must get up, however, to change the chaise's angle. Its precedents include bentwood rocking chairs, adjustable invalid chairs, Dr. Pascaud's patented "Surrepos," the Morris lounge chair, ocean-liner deck chairs, and-fundamental to the chair's sensuous quality-the earlier duchesse or duchesse brisee (fig. 17).34 Eighteenth-century grace and eroticism have their twentieth-century equivalent in this light, undulating structure poised on four points, so beautifully illustrated by the classic image of Perriand relaxing on

FIG 1 G

LE CORBUSIER-JEANNERET-PERRIAND.

Chaise longue with pony sk~n cover. 1928

CHARLOTTE P E R R I A N D

47

FIG 1 7

Precedents for the cha~se longue a. Duchesse. Mid-eighteenth century b. Thonet rocking chaise-longue, model no. 7500. Ca. 1880 c. Morris lounge chair as sketched by Le Corbusier and published in Vers une architecture (1923) d. Dupont recliner for the 'sick and wounded,' deta~l of advertisement in L'lllustration (December 28, 1929)

its stretched-canvas surface (fig. 18). Paradoxically, Le Corbusier evoked more mechanistic and masculine connotations in his description of the chair in Precisians. "Here we have the machine at rest. We built it with bicycle-frame tubes and we covered it with magnificent pony skin; it is so light that it can be pushed with the foot, it can be moved by a child. I thought of the cowboy from the Wild West smoking his pipe, his feet in the air higher than his head, against the chimneypiece: complete rest.n35Nevertheless, the image that Le Corbusier chose to publish in his Oeuvre complete to illustrate the chair was the iconic photograph of Perriand. As she later explained, her turned head was merely supposed to suggest a typical user; but looking at her exposed legs and stylish, fitted attire, it is hard not to suspect a certain "coquettishness" in her gesture. The photo, like the chair, has a seductive charm, which belies the purported neutrality of the machine aesthetic.36 The abandonment of traditional masculine or feminine chair types was, in fact, one of modern furniture's most radical breaks with precedent. As late as the spring of 1927, Le Corbusier still distinguished between male and female seating positions, but by 1929 those distinctions had disappeared.37 Because tubular steel combined such traditionally male and female attributes as strength and lightness, straight lines and curves, the differences between a man's chair and a woman's chair no longer seemed relevant. Modernism's elimination of figurative imagery also reduced references to gender, leaving scale, color, and setting as the primary variables. Even so, our associations of such furniture with a particular gender are ambiguous and shifting. Today, Breuer's and Mies's metal chairs frequently carry connotations of a masculine corporate world that the pieces did not have when they were first made. The cover of Breuer's 1927 furniture catalogue features a woman with a short skirt, bare arms and legs, and cropped hair;38and certainly, the original white leather cushions of the Barcelona and Brno chairs counter the masculine stereotypes associated with them today in the black or brown leather versions that frequently adorn office lobbies. More than most modern furniture designs, the chairs by Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Jeanneret-with their smaller

scale, humor, mixture of natural and industrial materials, and imagery of relaxation-have escaped being coopted by the corporate world.39 The home, their initial inspiration, continues to be their usual setting. In the late 1920s, the French design profession had begun to question gender distinctions in furniture design. In 1927, the Union Centrale des Arts Dbcoratifs sponsored a competition for a woman's desk. The program was controversial enough for Chavance to begin a magazine article on the competition with the following remarks: A delicate program, if one wishes to consider the customs and present-day aspirations of the recipient. A woman who loves sports, who drives her own automobile, does she still need a desk? More than ever, since she has also earned university degrees, works as a professional, and would gladly leave the business of the household to her "weak" husband. But would she be content with a masculine desk? One may doubt this, because fortunately she has not renounced her desire to please. She adjusts poorly to surroundings that are not flattering: a slight, frivolous elegance goes well with her new seriousne~s.~~ Perriand herself had been praised for her Bar in the Attic and her 1928 Dining Room in nearly the same terms. But in her own published discussions of furniture, she made no allusions to gender. In her 1929 essay "Wood or Metal?" (a passionate defense of metal furniture), she mentioned sports, automobiles, airplanes, and the "Man of the XX Century," but not the "Woman of the XX Cent~ry."~' Her few published statements during this period convey a general humanistic outlook that challenged bourgeois conventions and embraced collective goals, but nothing that addressed women's specific condition. This was not the case with her designs. The suggestions in her 1928 Dining Room of a new way of living facilitating woman's role as housekeeper and entertainer would become even stronger in her next public exhibit, at the 1929 Salon d'Automne.

FIG 1 P.

Perriand resting on the chaise longue. 1929. The photograph was set up by Perriand and taken by Jeanneret while Le Corbusier was lecturing in South America. Le Corb~~sier publ~shed a s~m~lar image (staged by Perriand in the same photo shoot) in the second volume of his and Jeanneret's Oeuvre compl&ie w~th the bottom section of the chaise supporting the legs in a lower posit~on (see "Selected Wr~tings by Perriand," f~g. 1).

CHARLOTTE PERRIA140

49

Equipment for a Dwelling

In 1929, Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Perriand decided to present their new furniture to the public in a model apartment for two at the Salon dlAutomne, the popular annual exhibition of painting, sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts. They had recently used the three chairs and the socalled airplane table (table en tubes d'avion) in two house commissions: the refurnishing of Raoul La Roche's house and the extensive renovation of the Villa Church in Ville d'Avray. Here they hoped to make a more general case for using standardized furniture and storage units, showing the flexibility and functionalism of their meubles-types. Thonet's Paris branch agreed to finance the installation and fabricate the storage units and metal beds and, in return, gained the rights to produce and market the partnership's metal tables and

chairs, including Perriand's earlier swivel dining chair and stool (pl. 13). She and Jeanneret completed and installed the exhibit while Le Corbusier was traveling in South America. Because he wouldn't get to see it, they made certain that many photographs were taken of the space.42These were widely published, giving the project a life far beyond its brief two-month existence. The 970-square-foot (90-square-meter) apartment consisted of a large doubleheight living room-comprising two-thirds of the space-and a linear sequence of smaller single-story spaces opening off of it: a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms, separated by partitions rather than walls (figs. 19-21). They called their exhibit Equipment for a Dwelling (Equipement intkrieur d'une habitation), thus clearly announcing their intention to demonstrate the household "equipment" that they had designed and

FIG 18

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND. Sketch plan of the

model apartment, Equ~pment for a Dwelling. Salon d'Automne, Paris. 1929

FIS 20

LE C O R B U S I E R - J E A N N E R E T - P E R R I A N D .

Equ~pment for a Dwell~ng.1929. Plan reconstructed by Arthur Ruegg

FIG 2 1

LE CORBUSIER-JEANNERET-PERRIAND.

Equipment for a Dwelling, view from the liv~ng area toward the dining area 1929. Strangely, the entrance to the exhibit has been removed from this photograph, as ~twas from the photograph published in the second volume of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret's Oeuvre compl&fe. As a photograph published in Art et decoration reveals, it was located just behind the distant tauteu~l grand confort, adlacent to the k~tchen and d ~ n ~ n areas. g

FIG 7 3

LE C O R B U S I E R AND P I E R R E JEANNERET.

Living room of the Esprit Nouveau pavilion. Expos~tion Internailonale des Arts Decoratifs et 1925 lndustr~els Modernes. Par~s.

considered essential to modern domestic life: storage units, chairs, and tables. Storage had been a long-standing preoccupation for Le Corbusier. In 1913, he saw and was deeply impressed by Francis Jourdain's simple, functional furniture, which included combinable and built-in storage components; and throughout the 1920s, Le Corbusier actively campaigned for casiers standards-standardized storage units to eliminate clutter and any freestanding furniture except chairs and tables. These casiers, he proposed, could be either built-in or made of movable standardized units, which could be assembled as space dividers or along walls; interior components and finishes could vary, depending on functional requirements. A modest version of this concept was realized in the storage units in the Esprit Nouveau pavilion (fig. 22). Perriand, too, had addressed storage in the wall unit in her 1928 Dining Room, but she had designed it specifically for the space and had not used standardized components. In the 1929 apartment, the long, linear storage wall dividing the living and service areas offered a much more convincing and dramatic demonstration of Le Corbusier's principles, while remaining an architecturally cohesive element that adapted to the functional contingencies of the space. The storage units dividing the living and kitchen areas extended full height; next to the bathroom and bedroom spaces, they were just five feet tall, allowing light to penetrate (figs. 23, 24). Additional storage units were placed under the strip window on the "exterior" But instead of the painted wooden surfaces of 1925, these casiers had sliding doors of glass, mirror, and enameled metal; some of the glass was painted on the interior to add a bright note. The units opened on both sides and accommodated a wide range of needs, from storing pots and pans to hiding away linens, ladies' lingerie, and toiletries. This freed the space of traditional armoires and cabinets. Moreover, the units could be rearranged and combined; two commentators compared them to a child's Mecano set. Paradoxically, their architectural function-as a spatial divider-gave them an air of permanence somewhat at odds with their intended flexibility of arrangement. The partnership's three newly designed chairs were prominently displayed in the living

FIG 23

LE CORBUSIER-JEANNERET-PERRIAND. Living and dln~ng area of Equ~pment for a Dwelling, view toward the casiers 1929. Note the visibility of the cylindrical shower stall from the living and dtning space.
FIG 2 4

Detail of the cas~ers. 1929

CHARLOTTE PERRlAllD

53

F\G 2 5

Glass table and s~ege a doss~er basculant c calfskin, Equipment for a Dwelling. 1929

space: two sieges a dossier basculant, one padded, the other covered in calfskin (fig. 25); a fur-covered chaise tongue; and two versions of the grand confort, one small and one large.44An additional canvas-covered siege a dossier basculant was placed in the smaller sleeping area. Perriand's swivel chair was selected to accommodate dining and work (fig. 26); and her two tubular-steel stools from the 1928 Dining Room were in the bathing and sleeping areas. Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Perriand intentionally included several variations of the prototypes, using different coverings and finishes. As Perriand explained, they regarded the chairs'frameswhich they designed as extensions of the human body-as universally applicable, and therefore capable of standardization, while materials, colors, and finishes could be tailored to individual preferences and particular settings.45 It was probably for this reason that they did not use Perriand's extendable dining table, which had been created for a specific small space and was therefore not a proper meuble-type.46Instead, they designed freestanding glass-topped tables that could be juxtaposed if a larger table was needed. A

simple glass-and-tubular-steeltable, reminiscent of the wood-and-tubular-steel tables in the Esprit Nouveau pavilion, was used in the study and conversation areas. For dining, they chose the more dramatic table en tubes d'avion, which they had designed using hollow steel-sheet supports, ovoid in crosssection (resembling the struts that connect the parallel wings of a biplane) and painted azure, topped by a seven-foot-long goldflecked slab of Saint-Gobain glass (see fig. 26). As in the partnership's three chairs, in the table design the supporting and supported elements are clearly differentiated, although their relationship is inverted: here, a rather massive frame holds up a relatively thin cantilevered plane. Further enhancing the tabletop's floating quality is its separation from the supporting frame by four small rods, which allowed the height to be adjusted.47 The table's strong aesthetic-its objectlike presence-somewhat belied its role as a table-type. As was so often the case with Le Corbusier and Perriand, an interest in the effect of forms and materials on the senses coexisted with an adherence to the ideas of type and standardization. Nonetheless, the

numerous staged photographs show the chairs and tables in different arrangements, stressing their mobility and multiplicity of use. Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Perriand believed that architecture should be a backdrop for the ever-changing spectacle of daily life. In this respect, their vision of the modern interior differed sharply from that of Mies van der Rohe, who designated specific locations for his pieces of furniture and intended them to remain there. In both the professional and the women's magazines, critics enthusiastically praised the apartment's new equipment. All admired the inventive storage system, citing its functional flexibility and infinite variations in arrangement. Leon Deshairs in Art et decoration compared it to the ad hoc shelves and furniture made of empty boxes in shanty housing, while he and other critics noted its similarities to the wooden storage system displayed by the Galeries Lafayette at the Salon d'Automne, which was also composed of combinable units (designed by Perriand'steacher Maurice D u f r ~ n e )The .~~ chairs, too, were lauded for their comfort, mobility, and ease of maintenance, an evaluation that is regarded more

skeptically today.49 Marcel Zahar especially appreciated the grands conforfs, evoking images of eighteenth-century aristocratic ease and of feminine delassement when he called them "modern bergeres with corsets of steel, where one can fully envelop oneself in the joys of idleness." A fan of Perriand's work, Zahar credited her specifically for the design of the chairs, mentioning the perfect fit between body and container and how the body never had "brutal" contact with metaL50 However, like Perriand's 1928 Dining Room and Le Corbusier's Esprit Nouveau pavilion before it, the apartment was much more than a setting for furniture-it was the clearest manifestation of Le Corbusier's ideas on domestic interiors in the late 1920s. Indeed, it succeeded where the two houses at the Weissenhof exhibition in Stuttgart had failed: as a convincing representation of comfortable middle-class living. Many of the ideas date back to his 1921 "Manual of the Dwelling," published in L'Esprit nouveau. There he had called for "one really large living room instead of a number of small ones"; a bathroom that is "one of the largest rooms in the house" and includes a shower and bath; "concealed or diffused lighting"; the storage of "odds and ends in drawers or cabinets"; "ventilating panes in the windows"; a house full of "light and air"; "clear" floors and walls (no heavy furniture or oriental rugs); and
FIG 2 6 Table en tubes d'avion w ~ t h Perrland's swivel chairs, Equlpment for a Dwelling. 1929

"a flat that is one size smaller than your parents accustomed you to." Finally, he urged "economy in your actions, your household management and in your thought^."^' The apartment answered these demands efficiently and elegantly. The spacious living area, nearly 650 square feet (60 square meters), combined dining, living, and work, and was amply lit with large expanses of glass, including operable windows; fans provided additional ventilation. Two large photographic lamps borrowed from Kodak projected light onto the white plastered ceiling, which then diffused it. In the sleeping and service areas, additional ambient light was provided by fixtures placed above the translucent glass ceiling. The bathroom, which was generously scaled (by French standards), was equipped with the most up-to-date fixtures. All clutter was efficiently concealed in the numerous storage units. The surfaces were all hard and plain, to facilitate cleaning. In fact, almost everything in the space was made of metal and glass. The facade consisted of a long strip window of sliding glass panels, with a band of Nevada glass brick below it, and, in the living area, a large plate-glass window extending the full double height above it. Most of the floor was composed of thick square slabs of green Saint-Gobain glass placed directly upon a layer of sand;52 the ceiling in the sleeping-service zone was

CHARLOTTE P E R R I A N D

55

etched glass; and the tiles in the bathroom were transparent blue glass. With shimmering and reflective surfaces everywhere, the total effect must have been quite spectacular. The spatial flow and transparency only reinforced the sense of a new, dramatically different domestic environment. Formally, the apartment was a significant departure from Le Corbusier's Esprit Nouveau pavilion (see fig. 22). The latter had a casual, almost eclectic air, which Arthur Riiegg has perceptively linked to its montagel~ke arrangement of pieces.53 Unlike the Gesamtkunstwerk spaces of Art Nouveau designers or the unified environments created by contemporary ensembliers, the interior of the pavilion was made up of diverse objects, with contrasting colors, textures, and surfaces juxtaposed in an almost dialectical fashion. Machinelike objects such as the "bicycle" stair were placed next to handmade ones such as a Berber rug; and a Purist painting was hung above a simple table of tubular steel and wood. Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Perriand took a different approach in the Salon d'Automne apartment. By designing all the furniture, and by using extensive amounts of glass and metal, they created a cohesive environment-one that celebrated what Perriand called the "aesthetics of There were no patterned Berber rugs and, what is even more surprising, no paintings. Only the bed cover of cat fur, an animal-hide throw, and a few bibelots served as counterpoint to this sleek, sparkling world. The character of the space was more impersonal than that of the Esprit Nouveau pavilion, where one detects Le Corbusier's particular sensibility in the selection and juxtaposition of objects; but, at the same time, the precision and aesthetic cohesion suggest the powerful control of the designers (an impression that belies their goal of giving residents a certain freedom in shaping their environment). This quality of aesthetic unity may have been due to Perriand's background in the decorative arts, but it was also undoubtedly a product of the polemical nature of the exhibit, where the ideas of standardization and utility were paramount. Here, paradoxically, functionalism did result in a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. It was a direction neither Perriand nor Le Corbusier would take again, unlike their continuing pursuit of functionalism itself. The Salon d'Automne kitchen was a model of scientific planning and represented a new level of functionalism in Le Corbusier's work Each activity of cooking was carefully studied and organized to maximize efficiency of movement and economy of space. Storage units permitted the careful arrangement of dishes (fig. 27); casseroles were even ranked by size. Two maces in the aoartment received special attention: the kitchen and the bath,
~-~ - -

FIG 2 ; '

neither of which had been given such treatment in the Esprit Nouveau pavilion in terms of either their design or Le Corbusier's published accounts of the building.

Shelving unit with pass-through between dining and k~tchen areas, Equipment for a Dwell~ng. 1929

The Apartment's Kitchen

Pots and pans were hung for easy access. The kitchen featured all the latest equipment: a garbage disposal, automatic icebox, enameled sinks with running water, an electric fan, and an electric stove, the latter ingeniously forming a central workstation with hinged metal counters, keeping all activity within arm's reach (fig. 28).55 Apparently, the ambient lighting worked extremely well, as Perriand noted, with not a shadow or dark corner to be found.56 A pass-through window, rare in middle-class urban homes, facilitated the serving of food and clearing of dishes.57 What was perhaps even more remarkable was the aesthetic pleasure conveyed by the design and arrangment of these elements. The shiny chrome surfaces, the attractive display of pots and pans, even a cabbage on the counter-all of these held out the promise that cooking might not be drudgery but an enjoyable part of daily life. Efficiency and lyricism were united in this traditionally mundane service space. In the kitchen (though not in the rest of the apartment), the designers no longer displayed industrial objefs-types as a sign of a new sensibility; instead they used ordinary domestic equipment and everyday cooking utensils to create a fresh, harmonious aesthetic. This focus on the kitchen was a radical break in Le Corbusier's own work. In "The Manual of the Dwelling," his only comment about the kitchen was to put it at the "top of the house to avoid smells."58 Even in his projects for mass-produced houses such as Citrohan or the Stuttgart prototypes, he apparently assumed that kitchens were for servants and therefore not of major importance; and in the case of his large-scale housing blocks such as the Immeubles-Villas of 1922, he proposed that collective dining halls or room service would replace the need for a well-designed cooking area. For most of the decade, he did not consider the kitchen a planning or aesthetic issue. What caused Le Corbusier's change in attitude? The immediate answer is, of course, Perriand. As already mentioned, not only had her training at the Union Centrale emphasized the practical aspects of daily life, but as a woman who loved to entertain and who had just completed the renovation of her own apartment, she was attuned to the functional requirements of domestic space. Undoubtedly

r.e Kitchen of Equipment for a Dwelling. 1929. Two of the three hinged metal counters are v~sible In the photograph.
FIG

C H A R L O T T E PERRIAPID

57

she was also inspired by Djo-Bourgeois's functional kitchen (see fig. 5 ) , which had been adjacent to her 1928 Dining Room at the Salon des Artistes Ddcorateurs. According to all accounts, Perriand was responsible for the design of the partnership's Salon d'Automne kitchen, and supporting this attribution to Perriand is a surviving study sketch of the plan in what is clearly her hand (see fig. 19).59 Two broader developments concerning womer; were also important to Le Corbusier's new interest in the kitchen and most certainly influenced his enthusiastic endorsement of Perriand's design: the emergence of a strong domestic-reform movement in Europe and the increasing prominence of the New Woman in France. Although he had long been a proponent of Taylorism (the American system of scientific management), Le Corbusier probably first became attentive to efforts to apply these principles to domestic planning in 1927, while working on the design of his two houses for the Weissenhof Siedlung. Women reformers in Germany, following the example of Americans such as Mary Pattison and Christine Frederick, actively campaigned to professionalize housework and rationalize domestic planning, seeking collaborations with architects to further their ideals. One of the most important proponents was Erna Meyer, who had criticized the irrational plans of Le Corbusier's houses in Stuttgart. Her book Das neue Haushalt, which included Frederick's kitchen diagrams, went into twentynine editions in two years. She also wrote the guidelines for the household section of the Weissenhof's program, and designed with Hilde Zirnrnermann a model kitchen where women could work sitting down. In Germany, Le Corbusier had also seen Ernst May's Frankfurt housing, which was especially notable for Grete Schutte-Lihotzky's prefabricated kitchens (fig. 29). At the Weissenhof exhibition, a model of her Frankfurt kitchen was displayed alongside Mitropa's Pullmanstyle kitchem60 France was much slower than Germany or the Netherlands to take up the cause of the Taylorized home. Besides a general reluctance to introduce American industrial methods, this delay was due in part to the traditional reliance on household servants (even in middle-class homes) and in part to the fact

that there was no clear alliance between architecture and domestic reform as there was in Germany. Although Frederick's book Household Engineering was translated early on, and individuals such as Henriette Cavaignac and technocrat Jules-Louis Breton had long promoted the rationalized home, it was not until the late 1920s that the movement gained new momentum. In 1926, the former Salon des Appareils MBnagers, which displayed modern appliances and model homes, was renamed the Salon des Arts Mdnagers and moved to the Grand Palais, where it was a major s u c ~ e s s . ~ And ' in 1928, Paulette Bernbge, a young philosophy graduate who, with Breton, was instrumental in organizing the Salon and editing its journal L'Art rnbnager, published two books, Si les fernrnes faisaient les maisons and De la rnbthode rnenagere. She was in some ways the French equivalent of Frederick and the major propagandist for American domestic science (though with a specifically French attention to style and customs). And like Frederick, Bernbge devoted special attention to kitchens (figs. 30, 31).62 One of her major points was that the modern residence entailed an interactive relationship between housewives, architects, engineers, and manufacturers. In Si les femmes faisaient les maisons, Bernege acknowledged the importance of Le Corbusier's ideas on standardized construction and stated that her objective was to extend the same ideas to running the household.63 She invited him to speak at the annual meeting of the Congrbs International d'organisation Scientifique du Travail to be held in Paris in June 1929, and he, in turn, nominated her as a member of the French delegation of the Congrbs International dlArchitecture Moderne, which would be meeting in Frankfurt long that O ~ t o b e rA .~ ~ letter from Bernege to Le Corbusier, written in 1964, one year before Le Corbusier's death, refers to their "very old ideological c~llaboration."~~ Perriand also knew Bernbge and Breton, as well as Breton's son Paul. As a student and young designer, Perriand had regularly attended their yearly exhibitions of household appliances, where modern kitchens were the norm, not the e ~ c e p t i o nOne . ~ ~ of the most enthusiastic reviews of the exhibit came from Mon chez moi, the official organ of the League of Household Management. As the journal's

FIG 2 9

oRETEs

~ ~

~ ~ ~-

~ ~ k~ f

kitchen. 1926-27

editor, BernBge probably made the choice to feature the kitchen on the cover, and she may well have been the anonymous critic who marveled, "This kitchen is pretty, it is ingenious. . . so remarkable, so rich in new ideas and so practicaLn6' In many respects, the model apartment fulfilled BernBge's vision of an art menager that united American efficiency and French style. The review marked the beginning of a rich association between Perriand and the Salon des Arts M6nagers that lasted until 1958. And in 1952, Paul Breton, who had become director of the Salon, published in his book L'Art mknager fran~ais another radical kitchen design, her prototype for the "open" kitchen of the Unit6 dlHabitation in Marseilles. The emergence of the idea of the New Woman, though more elusive, also deeply influenced Le Corbusier's shift in direction; it was a fundamental component of Perriand's identity as well. For French women, World War I was a major turning point, with huge numbers of women entering the workforce, often in nontraditional jobs. Moreover, it led, as historian Mary Louise Roberts has documented, to a major shift in attitudes breaking the long-standing Proudhonian dichotomy between harlot and housewife (courfisane and menagere).68 The popular press, movies, literature, and advertising of the period all referred to the New Woman. Whether at home or in the workplace, women were increasingly portrayed as independent, actively engaged in sports, and free to participate in urban life. The most radical model was Monique Lerbier, the heroine of Victor Margueritte's best-seller (1 922). She smoked, went to La Gar~onne night clubs, wore her hair a la garqonne, and had many affairs, with both men and women. And although she eventually gave up working to marry and have a family, to the postwar generation she represented women's new freedom. By the late 1920s, the New Woman was not just an image but was increasingly becoming a reality in France. Women had especially gained a new prorninence in the decorative arts; besides Perriand, there was Charlotte Alix, Sonia Delaunay, Eileen Gray, HBlene Henry, Lucie Holt Le Son, and Lucie Renaudot. Le Corbusier was acutely aware of these transformations. In the early 1920s, however skeptical he was of women's entry into the

LES

DISTAIVGES \ ' A M P I R E S

FIG 3 1 2

P A U L E T T E B E R N E G E . 'We Will Reduce the

Distances.- Diagram published in Mon chez moi (October 1923) comparing a poorly planned k~tchen w~th a -scient~fically'planned one
FIG 31

P A U L E T T E B E R N E G E . "Vampire Distances."

Diagram from her book S i les femmes faisaienf les maisons (1 928). Bernege equated the distance of repeatedly walk~ng the e~ght meters between her kitchen and dining room over a period of forty years to that between Paris and Lake Baikal in Siberia.

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND

59

'

'

decorative arts, he condemned domestic "slavery" and urged architects to alleviate its burdens. And in 1922, he addressed "The Manual of the Dwelling" to the bourgeois housewife, whom he recognized as a decision maker and consumer-at least in the domestic sphere. By 1926, he began to praise women's leading role in the current transformation of fashion and etiquette, culminating with his homage in PrBcisions in 1930: "The courage, the enterprise, the inventive spirit with which woman has revolutionized her dress are miracles of modern times. Thank you! What about us men? A dismal state of affairs. . . . We, office workers, have been beaten by a considerable length by women.

modern fixtures (except for the bidet) were standard fare in many British and American homes, they were hardly commonplace in French homes; as late as 1954, only 27 percent of dwellings had indoor bathrooms and only about a third of these had bathtubs7* But more radical than the inclusion of sanitary equipment was the elimination of the bathroom's walls in the Salon d'Automne apartment. The bathing area was located between two sleeping areas, with nothing but the sculptural shower stall obstructing the flow of space (fig. 33; see fig. 23 and Riiegg, fig. 4). There was something almost mischievous about the placement of this icon of modern plumbing. In the partition wall in front of it, the lower casier was omitted, and thus the remaining storage unit floated in the void, exposing the shower stall's base and top. In addition, the cylinder symmetrically straddled two floor surfaces-the glass slabs and porcelain tiles-and was centered on a division of the glass tile ceiling, further intensifying the spatial play and the shower's central presence. Anyone sitting in the living room would have seen alluring glimpses of legs and a head as someone entered or left the shower. Another provocative gesture was the low, tiled partition that on the bathing side supported a towel bar and on the other side served as a headboard for the double bed (and included an apparatus allowing the bed to be raised for easy cleaning). In this sensuous landscape of functional objects, all conventions of privacy were eliminated-between sleeping and living, bathing and sleeping, and between the bedrooms themselves. It was almost as if the partnership were defying Le Corbusier's German and Swiss critics who complained about the lack of privacy in his single-family house at the Weissenhof exhibition, where the parents' boudoir/bedroom/bathroom suite overlooked

FIG 3 7

Draw~ng published in Le Corbusler's La V~/le radieuse (1935). His caption states: 'This image taken from a women's magazine proposes new ways of I~v~ng-the elrmlnatlon of hypocrisy and certain constraints.- As in so many women's magazines from thls tlme, the housewife IS elegantly dressed as she both cooks and entertams her guests. Note the open kitchen, which was still highly unusual In middleclass Parisian homes.

The spirit of reform has only just appeared. It still has to make its impact on all aspects of life."69Just as he envisioned chairs accommodating women's new ease of posture, he believed that domestic space should accommodate their new active lives and more relaxed social demeanor. In terms of architecture, this meant that the cooking, dining, and living-room activities might be more integrated. The servant crisis that emerged after World War I, and to which Le Corbusier continually alluded, only made this integration of living and service spaces more essential. Paradoxically, as middle-class women gained more social freedom, they had less household help and probably needed to spend more time in the kitchem70Le Corbusier's vision of the New Woman was not the avant-garde garqonne, but rather a progressive, stylish woman who took pleasure in modern life but was still rooted in the home (fig. 32). In fact, this image was very similar to the New Woman promoted in the women's magazines and the domestic-reform movement. Like Bernkge, he conferred a new status on the kitchen.

The Apartment's Bathing Area

In contrast to his neglect of the kitchen, Le Corbusier had long promoted spacious bathing facilities and modern plumbing equipment, and the Salon d'Automne apartment beautifully demonstrated his principles. It included off-the-shelf white enameled fixtures-Charles Blanc tub, sink, and bidetand a cylindrical aluminum shower stall, custom-made, with a sliding door.71Although

the living room. An anonymous reviewer wrote: "Are we, in the future, to disregard the smell and the noise for the sake of an interesting spatial creation . . . ? Are these interpenetrating spaces a kind of program for living itself? Or is it all-as we suspect-a mere variation on and continuation of studio life.. where there is always a bed for a model and girlfriend, complemented by bath and bidet?"73 Le Corbusier responded that he had originally intended to place sliding panels

FIG 3 3

L E CORBUSIER-JEANNERET-PERRIAND.

V~ew of the bathing area of Equipment for a Dwelling showing the bedroom beyond. 1929

on the Weissenhof boudoir's parapet, permitting the area to be closed off, but that they were inadvertently omitted in the course of c o n s t r ~ c t i o nBut . ~ ~ no such claims were made concerning the exhibit at the Salon d'Automne. The intention of Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Perriand was to present a new program for living that reflected new social mores and a different kind of "etiquette." While embracing bourgeois values of cleanliness and efficiency, they gladly dispensed with all vestiges of bourgeois propriety. These ideas may have arisen out of their own personal circumstances. Le Corbusier lived with a model, Yvonne G a l l i ~in ,~ cramped ~ quarters on the Left Bank, and Perriand and her husband lived in a renovated photographer's studio in an attic a few blocks away. The impression of the Salon exhibit, encapsulated in the chaise longue itself, was a combination of bohemian casualness and aristocratic ease. It presented a new vision of twentieth-century middle-class life, without traditional class distinctions.

Critical Reactions
The contemporary press immediately recognized the radical-and innovative-nature of the exhibit. Max Terrier wrote in Art et decoration, "It was a manifesto, . . . a declaration of war on the ideal of the padded and stuffed bourgeois salon"; and Fabien Sollar noted in his enthusiastic review that Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Perriand were "the enemies of all decorative practice" and have demonstrated "their will to use all the contributions of science and to adapt to new customs." The skillful organization and functional resolution of the apartment gained all the critics' admiration. They used the word "ingenious" repeatedly. Even Raymond Cogniat in Llrchitecture praised the exhibit as the "most rigorously conceived space in the whole Salon," noting that there was not one superfluous detail and that everything possible had been done to make "life easier."76 The kitchen won special acclaim. Cogniat declared it "a perfect success," and the reviewer in La Construction moderne noted, "The kitchen, where all is studied, organized, and mechanized, will delight and fill with pleasure the most exacting and most scientific of housewives." This same

reviewer was the only one who mentioned the unconventional bathroom arrangement, remarking wryly, "The bathroom is a cell . . . or a screen!" The temporary nature of the exhibition space as well as a tendency of the French (especially in artistic circles) to be nonchalant about privacy may have contributed to this silence.77 The critics' comments about the apartment's overall ambiance and the aesthetic governing it were mixed. Cogniat concluded his review by harshly condemning the cold logic, which left "no room for individual taste." Echoing attacks on Le Corbusier by Leandre Vaillat in Le Temps and Camille Mauclair in Le Figaro, he wrote: "Standardization of materials, then of familiar objects. Consequently: standardization of interiors, their character, their atmosphere, their privacy. The principles of Le Corbusier and his collaborators are seductive, excellent in theory, the proposed solutions remarkable . . . [but] it is necessary to account for the tastes of the inhabitant, which are by necessity sentimental and no less important to his well-being. In thinking about practical comfort one shouldn't have to neglect emotional comfort." The critic in La Construction moderne agreed, noting that in such a space one would be "'equipped' to confront life" and could "deal with domestic crises, germs, and other impediments effectively, but one certainly could not enjoy oneself in daily life."78 As one might expect, admirers of Perriand and Le Corbusier, such as Chavance, took a different view. In his comments on the Salon, Chavance insisted that "logic did not exclude fantasy," and he specifically credited Perriand for adding color or an interesting form such as an animal skin or a bibelot to "enliven the severe order." Zahar, too, credited Perriand for the success of the project, especially its harmonious combination of the functional and the beautiful. He distinguished Perriand's metal furniture from the fashionable designs of her contemporaries, praising her efforts to make such pieces truly accessible "to the greatest What was most striking were not the particular criticisms or endorsements, which followed predictable lines, but the degree of reflection that the exhibit elicited in the decorative-arts magazines (not generally known for their probing commentary). Sollar acknowl-

edged the provocative effect that it generated. After admitting that the designers had probably overused metal (which he considered cold and unpleasant), he said, "But all the new things, which catch us off guard, force us to think." Several critics tried to explain the public's mixed reactions. LBon Deshairs noted a hesitancy among many viewers: "I saw some visitors more astonished than charmed by this 'Interior Equipment for Dwelling,' which resembles nothing that they like"; however, he then declared that Le Corbusier's ideas had a certain logic. A German commentator, Alfred Wenzel, gave a more psychological reading of people's ambivalence. He argued that their reticence was caused by a "fear of the emptiness of the external environment" and that this horror vacui was symptomatic of a lack of spiritual fulfillment. "Things that are not useful, that people collect and place around them, are just. . . attempts to have content-a form of self-defense against the huge gaping emptiness that emerges from inside the self." But ultimately, he saw the emptiness of the Salon d'Automne apartment as a positive sign and, like Loos and Le Corbusier, linked the elimination of decoration with a spiritual progress: "There seems to be a need inside us for light, free spaces, areas where we can gain a new, richer feeling for life. . . . This is why an 'empty' wall no longer seems to be gaping at us. It seems we don't have the same need to focus our vision. Everything suggests that we no longer need all the 'many' things that people used to need to protect them from being alone with themselve~."~~ Underlying these different reactions seems to be an acknowledgment that the notion of domestic space as a personal reflection of self (or the designer) was no longer a historical possibility. Whether they liked it or not, these commentators accepted the fact that industrialization and rationalization had changed daily life. As Wenzel made clear, this did not mean for the postwar generation that individualism was no longer possible, but rather that it must exist on another plane. Le Corbusier had expressed nearly the same idea five years earlier: "Let us propose an alternative definition of happiness: happiness lies in the creative faculty, in the most elevated possible activities. . . . Music, books, the creations of the spirit-these are what allow us to lead a life that is truly one's own.

That means a life that is individual-a life in which the individual is placed first, on the highest plane, . . . and detached from the secondary plane of his tools. These activities of the spirit . . . are what life is really aboutthat is, one's inner life, one's true life."81 In LXrt decoratif d'aujourd'hui, Le Corbusier had rejected the idea of the decorative arts as "art" and as an expression of personality. For him the realities of industrialization and modern society necessitatedthe mass production of utilitarian objects, and individuality resided in a more interior, "elevated," domain. There was, Le Corbusier argued, an inevitable contradiction between the advances in technology heralded by the bourgeoisie and its decorative trappings. Alluding to a bourgeois man in the epoch of King Louis Philippe, he wrote, "Darwin's law was applied with swifter fatality to this living individual than to his ac~essories."~~ This critique anticipated Walter Benjamin's commentary on the Louis Philippe interior, in which he referred (in an excursus) to Art Nouveau as a last-gasp attempt to escape the anonymity and collectivism of t e c h n ~ l o g yHowever, .~~ unlike Benjamin, who saw traditional art and its "aura" as ending, Le Corbusier believed that painting and architecture remained art, but that the decorative arts did not. He was adamant that functional objects should be just that-tools. Of course, the beauty of the Salon d'Automne apartment noted by Zahar belied this belief. And that same year, Le Corbusier, in an exchange with the Czech Marxist Karel Teige, argued that form, not just function, mattered-even in utilitarian objects.84Perriand unabashedly declared her aesthetic enthusiasms: "Aluminum varnish, Duco, Parkerisation, Paint . . . we get a range of wonderful combinations and new aesthetic effects. UNITY IN ARCHITECTURE and yet again POETRY."~~ What both designers considered essential was that the form of functional objects have a collective dimension, and thus embody the zeitgeist. Only color and texture-qualities that Le Corbusier and Ozenfant had considered secondary to form-might reflect individual taste.86 What critics did not discuss and what Le Corbusier and Perriand did not confront at the time was the elitism of the exhibit. Their furnishings and fixtures were expensive. Thonet never seems to have produced the

chairs in large runs, nor did the chairs' designs lend themselves to mass production. A chaise longue with a canvas cover, for instance, was listed in a 1930 Thonet catalogue for 2,500 francs, approximately six times the cost of a wooden Morris lounge chair. Wealthy banker Raoul La Roche complained about the price of one of the prototypes of the fauteuilgrand confort, which, at 4,230 francs, even he found too high.87 Among contemporary commentators, Italian critic Edoardo Persico alone acknowledged the new furniture's inherent elitism: What does it matter if Ruhlmann is the French bourgeoisie, and the others the avant-garde? As we read in a recent book. . . , "Ruhlmann, who is demanding to the point of excess with regard to the quality of what he produces, has worked only for a very rich clientele, for whom he has supplied models that are either overly sumptuous, encrusted with ivory, or extremely simple, in the latter of which, we believe, he shows his refinement more clearly.". . . Perhaps the style of Le Corbusier-a metal armchair, an adjustable table, a surrealistic carpet-is of a different type? If we look closely, there is but one difference: Ruhlmann was the ensemblier of the French bourgeoisie, Le Corbusier is preparing to be the same for the bourgeoisie of all Europe.8e Persico's critique applied equally to the apartment as a whole. The appliances featured in the kitchen and bath were costly, and far beyond the reach of working-class resid e n t ~Even . ~ ~electric lighting was a luxury in 1920s France. In 1927, only 1 4 percent of the population subscribed to electricity, and even then it was often used only in the living room.g0The size of the Salon d'Automne apartment also implied considerable financial resources. In his paper for the Frankfurt ClAM meeting in 1929, Le Corbusier proposed residential cells of 150 square feet (1 4 square meters) per person; in the Salon dlAutomne apartment, two occupants would each have had three times the space. There was thus a certain irony in Le Corbusier's use of the small bedroom to illustrate a 14-square-meter unit, which he presented at the 1930 ClAM

" LA VII
ti

ADIEUISE "

LA CELLULE
DE

14

M2 PAR HABITANT
FIG 3 4

The small bedroom of Equipment for a Dwelling as an example of the 14m' cell. Le Corbusier published th~s image and four other photographs of the Salon d'Automne model apartment in Plans (November 1931).

meeting in Brussels, as well as the set of apartment plans based on that measurement that were published the next year in the Regional Syndicalist publication Plans (figs. 34, 35; see Ruegg, fig. 5).91 Perriand designed all of these units. But it was not just the high costs of the furnishings and appliances that excluded a working-class clientele. As Perriand admitted in an interview late in her life, few workingclass residents-indeed, few middle-class residents-would have tolerated the open bathing area or the mechanistic imagery. The designers, in their iconoclastic disdain for bourgeois pretensions, had created a space that would have appealed only to an artistic or intellectualelite.92 Although none of the French commentators criticized the designers on these grounds, Le Corbusier and Perriand soon became acutely aware of the contradictions in their own positions. The Salon d'Automne exhibit opened a week after the Wall Street crash. Le Corbusier began to question his unqualified enthusiasm for American industrial methods as a social solution, and a year later he became involved in a small nonconformist movement, Regional Syndicalism, which rejected capitalism and parliamentary democracy and embraced a diffuse program uniting prewar syndicalism (unionism), regionalism, industrial modernization, and spiritual regeneration. During the 1930s, Perriand confronted social inequity and political crises of the period more directly: she joined the newly formed Association des Ecrivains et Artistes R&volutionnaires(AEAR) in 1932, took courses at the Marxist Workers' University in 1934, and collaborated with a group of young leftist architects, Jeunes 1937, who were affiliated with the Maison de la Culture. By the middle of the decade, she rejected the elitism of traditional and avant-garde architecture and actively sought to make her own designs more affordable and accessible-goals that the 1929 model apartment had largely failed to achieve.

FIG 35

LE CORBUSIER-JEANNERET-PERRIAND.

Plans for residences in Radiant City. 1930 a. Type 1 (1 x 14 m2).Apartment for a bachelor b. Type 6 (5,6,7, or 8 x 14m2). Apartment for a couple w ~ t h three, four, f~ve, or six children

Future Influence
Like all of Le Corbusier's exhibits, the model apartment had another purpose: to offer a symbolic representation of future ways of

living. Judging from its wide coverage in the press and subsequent influence on architects, it appears to have succeeded on that level. As a convincing synthesis of functionalism and formal invention, it created a compelling image of a modernized home that was comfortable, efficient, and easy to maintain. While its innovations did not lead to any immediate change in French domestic interiors, the apartment provided a visual language for such a transformation to occur. Part of its power as a model of modernity stemmed from the refusal of Perriand and her codesigners to make concessions to budget constraints and popular taste. Their rigorous use of rational planning and modern equipment made it difficult for critics (and presumably Salon visitors) to ignore their innovations. Modern kitchen and bathroom fixtures were presented not as luxuries but as basic necessities; and there were no attempts to disguise their functional appearance, in contrast to the interiors displayed in Bernege's books on household management, in which curtains softened the impact of the shiny enameled appliances. The Salon dlAutomne apartment made new technology visually alluring on its own terms. In the face of the conservative political climate in France-especially the rejection of women's suffrage, the aggressive campaign for a higher birthrate, and the considerable anxiety about women's new social freedoms-this image of a modernized home undoubtedly played a progressive role at the time. It would have been difficult for anyone to imagine a woman occupying the apartment as a traditional housewife or "angel of the hearth"; rather, the exhibit suggested an occupant who would perform her tasks with competence, efficiency, and grace, permitting time for leisure or employment. This untraditional apartment was clearly a setting for a New Woman. Perriand and Le Corbusier were inspired by women's changing social role, but they also symbolically extended its range of possibilities in ways that had consequences for French architecture and society at large. Most notably, the model apartment validated spaces that were traditionally considered service or "women's" domains and thus were outside the scope of architecture. Apart from low-cost housing, few French architects had seen the kitchen as a major design concern.

After the 1929 Salon d'Automne, it took on a new p r ~ m i n e n c eNowhere .~~ was this more apparent than in Le Corbusier's own work. Although he had long been attentive to questions of furniture and domestic arrangements, he now focused on kitchens as important residential spaces. They were no longer isolated or small, and he began to feature them in his publications. In the first volume of the Oeuvre complete, there are no images of kitchens; in the second volume (1 929-34), they are well represented-the most significant example being the full-page photograph of the kitchen at the Villa Savoye, which, like the photograph of the entrance foyer, has become one of the canonical images of modern life. The caption is telling: "The kitchen is not precisely the sanctuary of the house, but it is certainly one of the most important places. Kitchen and living room, both are the rooms where one lives."94 Another caption, under a photograph of the kitchen in his new apartment at Porte Molitor, referred to the kitchen as "one of the essential rooms of the house." Le Corbusier specifically asked Perriand to design this space, and the photograph shows his wife, Yvonne, in slacks and short hair, as a model of the modern professional housewife.95And in his 1934 perspective sketch of the Radiant Farm, he presented for the first time an open kitchen. In all these images, the kitchen is clearly a woman's (or, in the case of the Villa Savoye, a servant's) domain, but it is also a space that is visible and of serious professional concern. In the early 1930s, other avant-garde French architects began to address the issue of kitchen design. They were influenced by many of the same factors as Le Corbusier: the innovations at Frankfurt and Stuttgart, the Salons des Arts Menagers, and the prominence of the New Woman in French culture. But Perriand's appealing design-and the subsequent publicity-also had a large impact. In 1931, Rob Mallet-Stevens published a kitchen project and an article in LHrt menager titled "The Aesthetic of the K i t ~ h e n "in ;~ 1934, ~ the Ateliers Lurqat showed an attractive "dining-room kitchen" at the Salon des Arts M6nagers; and in 1935, the new professional magazine L'Architecture d'aujourd'huifeatured two innovative kitchens, one by Andre Hermant and the other by Georges-Henri Pingusson, both of them

Perriand's colleagues from the Union des Artistes Modernesg7By the mid-1930s, the kitchen had become an integral part of modern French architecture, though more in terms of symbolic discourse than as an area of widespread practice. The creation of a mass market for domestic appliances was impeded by entrenched traditions, conservative housing legislation, and, more than anything else, the Depression. But these kitchen designs, like the model apartment, set new standards for comfort and abundance that pointed the way to a modernized post-World War II France. Indeed, Le Corbusier asked Perriand to collaborate with him again when he tackled his first large-scale housing project for France's postwar reconstruction: the Unite d9Habitationin Marseilles (figs. 36, 37). However important it was as a model of technological modernity and rationalization, the Salon dlAutomne apartment also suggested something more allusive and more promising. Its attractive, genderless furniture, its gleaming appliances, and the spacious, flexible living space all presented an image of a home that was not only comfortable and efficient but gracious to live in. In short, it offered a vision of the domestic interior that liberated people from the constraints of outmoded traditions as well as rigid gender and class stereotypes, and provided them with a more harmonious, even joyful way of living-a glimpse of what Perriand would later call "un art de vivre."

FIG 36

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND. Dlagram of the

kitchen, Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles. 1950

FIG 3 7

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND-ATELIER LE CORB US1 ER. Kitchen counter for Le Corbusier's Unite

d'Habitation, Marseilles. 1950. Thls prototypical kltchen, des~gned by Perrland and fabricated by the kitchen company CEPAC in 1950, was too expenslve to include in the Un1tt5dlHabltation. However, a slmilar kitchen that Perr~and deslgned for the project, which was used, also featured a counter that opened onto the living area, a solution that remained unusual In middle-class French homes. In 1985, reflecting on the Unlte's kitchen design, she said: 'The integration of the kitchen with the living room, by using a 'kitchen-bar,' simplifies all the functional activities whlle allowlng the housewife an ease of communication with her family and friends. A successful experiment. Over the past thirty years, the kitchens have been updated with modern appl~ances, but the quallty of communication has remalned unchanged."