CHARLOTTE PERRIAND 1903-1999.

Designer of iconic Modernist furniture and interiors, Charlotte Perriand died at the end of last year after a long and highly adventurous life and career.

She once went to a party as a tube of paint while a student at the Paris Ecole de l'Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs 1920-1925. Her crafts-based training was made to seem old hat by the shiny cars she saw on the Champs-Elysees so, when she married and moved to a rented garret on the Place Saint-Sulpice in 1926, she redesigned the interior in a machine-age idiom with a private bar instead of a living room. She recreated her gleaming 'Bar sous le Toit' at the 1927 Salon d'Automne, where it won her instant acclaim -- as the prettiest designer in town. Seeing no future in that, Perriand toyed with the idea of switching to a career in agriculture, 'to get some air', until a friend persuaded her to read Vers une Architecture and L'Art Decoratif d'Aujourd'hui. The way ahead now seemed clear: she must work for Le Corbusier. 'We don't embroider cushions here', said he and showed her the door. But he changed his mind after visiting the 'Bar sous le Toit' with Pierre Jeanneret.

Perriand joined the cosmopolitan team of unpaid assistants at 35, Rue de Servers in October 1927 and soon learned to wrap her legs in newspaper, so bitterly cold was the atelier in winter. As is well known, she worked on full-size designs for casiers, tables and three types of chair in conjunction with the fitting out of the Villa La Roche and the Villa Church. Le Corbusier rapidly lost interest in the furniture designs until, on her own initiative in 1928, she had prototypes made of the panier a coussins (armchair in two sizes, later renamed the Petit and Grand Confort), swing-back chair and chaise longue. Ils sont coquets' was his approving reaction. More prototypes were made for the 1929 Salon d'Automne and Thonet was persuaded to pay for them but, to Perriand's regret, the designs were never developed for mass production.

When her marriage ended in 1930, she moved to a garret in Montparnasse. Much given to fresh air and vigorous exercise, she did gymnastics on the rooftops (reached via her lavatory window) and made frequent excursions to the country with friends and colleagues to ski, climb, swim, hike and collect art brut (pebbles and the like). And she travelled, twice to Moscow (1930 and 1933/4) and to the 1933 Athens CIAM.

At the atelier, she was given 'l'entiere responsabilite dans la realisation nos equipments domestiques', including furniture and fittings for the Pavillon Suisse at Cite Universitaire, the Salvation Army's Cite de Refuge and Le Corbusier's own flat at Rue Nungesser-et-Coli. Why he required such a high bed was never specified (for the view or 'les jeux de la nuit'?). But she was acutely aware of the wrench it was for his wife to leave the neighbourly Saint-Germain-des-Pres district in October 1934 for the isolation of the edge of town penthouse.

Perriand left the Rue de Severs atelier in 1937. After collaborating with her great friend Fernand Leger on a stand for the Agriculture Ministry at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, she was involved with a project for a Savoie ski resort. This was shelved when war was declared, so she returned to Paris to work with Georges Blanchon, Pierre Jeanneret and Jean Prouve on prefabricated temporary buildings for military use. Then, on 3 May 1940, she was offered a formal contract to act as advisor to the Imperial Ministry for Trade and Industry in Japan. Despite the outbreak of hostilities in France, she boarded the Hakusan Maru and steamed out of Marseilles on 15 June.

A highly organized schedule awaited Perriand on her arrival in Japan in late August. Copies of Western products were being manufactured for export, yet to her, Japanese civilization seemed to offer far more potential for innovation than the stifling accumulation of styles and fashions in Europe. This she sought to demonstrate by juxtaposing 'good' and 'bad' ready-mades and a number of purpose-made exhibits, such as a new version of her 1928/29 chaise longue designed to exploit the properties of bamboo, in her exhibition Tradition-Selection-Creation at the Tokyo and Osaka branches of Takashimaya in March/May 1941 (CfAR Vol 101, 1947).

The bombing of Pearl Harbor put paid to her plans to reach France via the US; in 1942, she was 'repatriated' to Vietnam; there, she married Jacques Martin, gave birth to their daughter and lived through American bombing, Japanese repression and Viet-minh raids until 1946. On returning to France, Perriand gradually picked up her professional activities: a modest ski resort (1946-1949), elements of the Saint-Lo hospital (1947, with Paul Nelson and Fernand Leger), a prototype kitchen for the Marseilles Unite (1950, with Le Corbusier) and numerous projects with Jean Prouve.

She was involved, too, with exhibitions, notably organizing the French section at the 9th Milan triennale (1951) and her own Synthese des Arts in Tokyo (1955). By the mid-50s, work was flowing in: refitting the League of Nations building, Geneva for the UN (1957-1970); remodelling Air France offices in London, Paris and Tokyo; student and common rooms at the Maison du Bresil, Paris (1959, with Le Corbusier and Lucio Costa), followed by the French Tourist office in London (1960 with Erno Goldfinger), intermittent work on Savoie ski resorts (1962-1968) and teaching. At 90, Perriand designed the delightful 'espace the' erected in the UNESCO garden, Paris for a festival of Japanese culture. Her career has been the subject of two major retrospectives (1985, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; 1996, Design Museum, London) and her autobiography Une Vie de Creation (1998) abounds with human interest.