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

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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 0-81 09-4503-7 1. Perriand, Charlotte-Criticism and

interpretation. 2, Interior decoration-France- History-20th century. I. Title: Art of living. II. McLeod, Mary. Ill. Aujame, Roger.

PAGE 2 Texts copyright Q 2003 the authors CHARLOTTE PERRIAND. EspaceB vivre. Compilation copyright Q 2003 Mary McLeod Apartment, Paris. 1970

and The Architectural League of New York

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@I IA.\ 1 l.\RTL\&l~k: G R O U P E

New Designs for Living Domestic Equipment of Charlotte Perriand,

Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret, 1928-29

MARY 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 any-

thing 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 per-

sonal 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 con-

sidered 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 paid-

at least not regularly. Perriand also continued

to work independently and, in addition,

received support from her husband, a pros-

perous 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 atel- ler. Par~s. 1928

Arts D6coratifs when he so adamantly disap- proved 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 con- temporary social attitudes and modes of pro- duction have on their ideas? Was Perriand's identity as a woman-a New Woman-a fac- tor 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 atti- tudes about furniture. He believed that furniture should be "equipmentn-functional, efficient, and standardized, as anonymous and versatile as his Purist objets-types.5 His mod- els 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 191 2 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 nineteenth- century craft mentality and for lacking an over- all 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 organiza- tion, although he disapproved of their flamboy- ant 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 exist- ing 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 stor- age components (casiers, literally "pigeon- holes") 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 furni- ture 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 primi-

tive efforts. By 1927, he had also become frustrated

with the market's failure to generate proto- types for mass production. Despite his con- stant 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 seri- ally produced and sold in the French depart- ment 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 large- scale innovation. France had no equivalent to Germany's Standard-Mobel, which was fabri- cating 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 architec- ture 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 maga- zines 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 bent- wood 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 demon- strate 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 accom- plished interiors, while Le Corbusier, over- whelmed with the controversy surrounding

the League of Nations competition, had con- siderable difficulty completing the furnishings for his houses. Roth, who was supervising their construction in Stuttgart, recounted that Le Corbusier kept promising to send him fur-

niture 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 AND P IERRE JEANNERET. 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 ~ d not own one.

looked admittedly less polished than Mies van der Rohe's and Lilly Reich's model apart-

ments. 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 engi-

neer's aesthetic?"' Perriand offered expertise in these

domains, as well as an original modern sensi- bility 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 assump- tion, 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 interi- or 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 pre- sented 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 reper- toire.16 More important, she began to develop an image of modern living that would pro- foundly influence the work of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret.

The 1928 Dining Room FIG 4

GEORGES DJO-BOURGEOIS. Living Room. Salon des Artistes Decorateurs, Paris. 1928.

Perriand saw the dining room that she The curtains and rugs were designed by Elise Djo-Bourgeois.

exhibited in 1928 as part of a broader collec- tive 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 "uni- fied 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 incorpo-

rated 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 double- height 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' dis-

plays. It was at once functional and elegant, original without being too bohemian; the pre-

dictable 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

(figs. 7, 8; pl. 4). There were two additional

stools: one from her 1927 bar with an uphol- stered 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 crit-

ics noted, sewice in a sewantless household.

C H A R L O T T E PERRIC\t4D 39

FIG 5

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

FIG e.

MAURICE DUFRENE. Kitchen. Salon des Artlstes Decorateurs, Paris. 1926. Produced by La Maitrise (Galeties Lafayefie)

Her furniture designs were also more emphat- ically 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.20 A new component

here was mobility: her dining chairs and four- legged 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 mani- festo, just as important was the more impres- sionistic objective of creating a fresh and youthful environment that addressed the exi- gencies 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 dis- pensed with bourgeois formalities and need- less domestic labor. Even in comparison to other modernist displays in the Salon, such as the country house of her teacher Maurice Dufrkne (fig. 9), the group's bold declaration of a new kind of home and family life stood out as innovative.

This social objective was widely recog- nized in the contemporary press. In the middle- of-the-road review L'Architecture, Pierre Olmer labeled the group's effort "extreme left" and explicitly noted that he was intentionally

FIG 7

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND. 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)

MAURICE DUFRENE. Din~ng Areain acountry House. Salon des Art~stes Decorateurs, Par~s. 1928

FIG 1 0

Perriand in her attlc apartment in Paris. 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 cele-

brated 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 aero-

plane and wireless have in a few years revolu-

tionised 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 maga-

zines 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-

ods of quiet and rep~se."~ ' The fact that the

model room was designed by a woman-one

who wore boldly patterned clothes, a neck-

lace of steel ball bearings, and her hair a la

garqonne (fig. 1 0)-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 tm~sphere .~~ In

Mobilier et dkcoration, Gabriel Henriot con-

cluded his review of the show by calling the

group's display "the freshest, the most origi-

nal and the most successful in the Salon."

Paradoxically, what seems to have won over

even those commentators skeptical of mod-

ernism'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 pleas-

ant dining and good company." 'The furnish-

ings," he added, "are an especially ingenious

and charming solution to the problems of

C H A R L O T T E P E R R I A F I D 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 audi- e n ~ e . ~ ~ Femininity-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 fur-

nishing 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 proto-

type for each. Already in 1926 he had deter-

mined 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.25 She worked out with

Jeanneret the designs and full-scale details,

which Le Corbusier would then sometimes

FIG t 1

LE CORBUSIER. Sketch of seven seating positions, published in Prkc~sions (1 930)

FIG i ?

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND. Photomontage 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 mat-

ter into her own hands and assembled the

prototypes in her studio apartment. She rurn-

maged through hardware stores and depart-

ment 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, "11s sont coquets."26 In 1932, he

credited Perriand for having "the sole respon-

sibility 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.

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

certain armchairs gives me a decent and

polite position."28 The Le Corbusier partner-

ship often adapted traditional motifs and com-

bined 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.29 In 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

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 BREUER. Wass~ly chair. Chrome-plated tubular steel and canvas. 1925

C H A R L O T T E P E R R I A N D 45

with notable differences in scale and elabora-

tion. 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 man-

nered 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

line of Mies's elegant MR chair of 1 927.30 It

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 associa-

tions and formal continuities were more

important than technology or function.

The fauteuil grand confort, in contrast to

the siege a dossier basculant, is a machine-

for-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 tubular-

steel 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 sensu-

ous quality-the earlier duchesse or duchesse

brisee (fig. 1 7).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 PERRIAND 47

FIG 17

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 chimney- piece: complete rest.n35 Nevertheless, 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 look- ing at her exposed legs and stylish, fitted attire,

it is hard not to suspect a certain "coquettish- ness" in her gesture. The photo, like the chair, has a seductive charm, which belies the pur- ported 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 tradi- tionally 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 vari- ables. Even so, our associations of such furni- ture with a particular gender are ambiguous and shifting. Today, Breuer's and Mies's metal chairs frequently carry connotations of a mas- culine 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;38 and certainly, the original white leather cushions of the Barcelona and Brno chairs counter the masculine stereo- types 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 pro-

fession had begun to question gender distinc- tions 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 con- sider the customs and present-day aspi-

rations of the recipient. A woman who loves sports, who drives her own automo- bile, does she still need a desk? More than ever, since she has also earned uni- versity 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 mascu- line desk?

One may doubt this, because fortu- nately she has not renounced her desire to please. She adjusts poorly to surround- ings that are not flattering: a slight, frivo- lous elegance goes well with her new

ser iousne~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 pub- lished discussions of furniture, she made no allusions to gender. In her 1929 essay "Wood or Metal?" (a passionate defense of metal fur- niture), 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 sup- porting the legs in a lower posit~on (see "Selected Wr~tings by Perriand," f~g. 1).

C H A R L O T T E P E R R I A 1 4 0 49

Equipment for a Dwelling

In 1929, Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and

Perriand decided to present their new furni-

ture to the public in a model apartment for

two at the Salon dlAutomne, the popular

annual exhibition of painting, sculpture, archi-

tecture, and the decorative arts. They had

recently used the three chairs and the so-

called 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 stor- age units, showing the flexibility and function-

alism 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.42 These 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 double-

height 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, sep-

arated 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 CORBUSIER-JEANNERET-PERRIAND. Equ~pment for a Dwell~ng. 1929. Plan reconstructed by Arthur Ruegg

FIG 21

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 photo- graph, as ~t was 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 g areas.

considered essential to modern domestic life:

storage units, chairs, and tables.

Storage had been a long-standing

preoccupation for Le Corbusier. In 191 3, 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 pavil-

ion (fig. 22). Perriand, too, had addressed storage in the wall unit in her 1928 Dining

Room, but she had designed it specifically for

FIG 73

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

the space and had not used standardized

components. In the 1929 apartment, the long,

linear storage wall dividing the living and serv-

ice areas offered a much more convincing

and dramatic demonstration of Le Corbusier's principles, while remaining an architecturally

cohesive element that adapted to the func-

tional 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 flexibil-

ity 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 24

Detail of the cas~ers. 1929

C H A R L O T T E P E R R l A l l D 53

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.44 An 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'frames-

which they designed as extensions of the

human body-as universally applicable, and

therefore capable of standardization, while

materials, colors, and finishes could be tai-

lored 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.46 Instead, they designed free-

standing glass-topped tables that could be

juxtaposed if a larger table was needed. A

F\G 2 5

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

simple glass-and-tubular-steel table, reminis-

cent 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 hol-

low steel-sheet supports, ovoid in cross-

section (resembling the struts that connect

the parallel wings of a biplane) and painted

azure, topped by a seven-foot-long gold-

flecked slab of Saint-Gobain glass (see fig.

26). As in the partnership's three chairs, in

the table design the supporting and sup-

ported 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 back-

drop 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's teacher Maurice

D u f r ~ n e ) . ~ ~ The chairs, too, were lauded for

their comfort, mobility, and ease of mainte-

nance, 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 com-

fortable 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

"a flat that is one size smaller than your par-

ents accustomed you to." Finally, he urged

"economy in your actions, your household

management and in your thought^."^' The

apartment answered these demands effi- ciently 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, includ-

ing operable windows; fans provided addi-

tional 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 fix-

tures placed above the translucent glass ceil-

ing. 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

FIG 26

Table en tubes d'avion w~th Perrland's swivel Equlpment for a Dwelling. 1929

chairs,

C H A R L O T T E 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 Gesamt-

kunstwerk spaces of Art Nouveau designers

or the unified environments created by con-

temporary 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 envi-

ronment-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 shap-

ing their environment). This quality of aesthetic

unity may have been due to Perriand's back-

ground in the decorative arts, but it was also

undoubtedly a product of the polemical

nature of the exhibit, where the ideas of stan-

dardization 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 func-

tionalism itself.

Two maces in the aoartment received F IG 2;' ~-~ - -

special attention: the kitchen and the bath, Shelving unit with pass-through between dining and k~tchen areas, Equipment for a Dwell~ng. 1929

neither of which had been given such treat-

ment in the Esprit Nouveau pavilion in terms

of either their design or Le Corbusier's pub-

lished accounts of the building.

The Apartment's Kitchen

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 move-

ment and economy of space. Storage units

permitted the careful arrangement of dishes

(fig. 27); casseroles were even ranked by size.

Pots and pans were hung for easy access.

The kitchen featured all the latest equipment:

a garbage disposal, automatic icebox, enam-

eled 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 lyri-

cism 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 impor-

tance; 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

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

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. 1 9).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 twenty- nine 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 prefabri- cated kitchens (fig. 29). At the Weissenhof exhibition, a model of her Frankfurt kitchen was displayed alongside Mitropa's Pullman- style 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 move- ment 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 suc~ess.~ ' And in 1928, Paulette Bernbge, a young philosophy gradu- ate 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

FIG 2 9 housewives, architects, engineers, and manu- oRETE s , - ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ - ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ k f ~ d

facturers. In Si les femmes faisaient les kitchen. 1926-27

maisons, Bernege acknowledged the impor- tance 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, nom- inated her as a member of the French delega- tion of the Congrbs International dlArchitecture Moderne, which would be meeting in Frankfurt that O ~ t o b e r . ~ ~ A long 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~cep t i on .~~ One 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

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 ingen- ious. . . 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 effi- ciency 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 docu- mented, 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 La Gar~onne (1 922). She smoked, went to

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 prorni- nence 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 \ 'AMPIRES FIG 312

PAULETTE BERNEGE. '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

PAULETTE BERN EGE. "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 modern fixtures (except for the bidet) were

"slavery" and urged architects to alleviate its standard fare in many British and American

burdens. And in 1922, he addressed "The homes, they were hardly commonplace in

Manual of the Dwelling" to the bourgeois French homes; as late as 1954, only 27 per-

housewife, whom he recognized as a decision cent of dwellings had indoor bathrooms and

maker and consumer-at least in the domes- only about a third of these had bathtubs7*

tic sphere. By 1926, he began to praise But more radical than the inclusion of sanitary

women's leading role in the current transfor- equipment was the elimination of the bath-

mation of fashion and etiquette, culminating room's walls in the Salon d'Automne apart-

with his homage in PrBcisions in 1930: "The ment. The bathing area was located between

courage, the enterprise, the inventive spirit two sleeping areas, with nothing but the

FIG 37

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 middle- class Parisian homes.

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.

The spirit of reform has only just appeared. It

still has to make its impact on all aspects of

life."69 Just as he envisioned chairs accom-

modating women's new ease of posture, he

believed that domestic space should accom-

modate their new active lives and more

relaxed social demeanor. In terms of architec-

ture, this meant that the cooking, dining, and

living-room activities might be more inte-

grated. The servant crisis that emerged after

World War I, and to which Le Corbusier con-

tinually 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 kitchem70 Le 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 equip-

ment, and the Salon d'Automne apartment

beautifully demonstrated his principles. It

included off-the-shelf white enameled fix-

tures-Charles Blanc tub, sink, and bidet-

and a cylindrical aluminum shower stall,

custom-made, with a sliding door.71 Although

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 porce-

lain tiles-and was centered on a division of

the glass tile ceiling, further intensifying the

spatial play and the shower's central pres-

ence. 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 bed-

rooms 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

the living room. An anonymous reviewer

wrote: "Are we, in the future, to disregard the

smell and the noise for the sake of an inter-

esting spatial creation . . . ? Are these inter-

penetrating spaces a kind of program for liv-

ing 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 ~ e w of the bathing area of Equipment for a Dwelling showing the bedroom beyond. 1929

on the Weissenhof boudoir's parapet, permit- ting the area to be closed off, but that they were inadvertently omitted in the course of const r~ct ion.~~ But 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 cleanli- ness and efficiency, they gladly dispensed with all vestiges of bourgeois propriety. These

ideas may have arisen out of their own per- sonal 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, encapsu-

lated in the chaise longue itself, was a com- bination of bohemian casualness and aristo-

cratic ease. It presented a new vision of twentieth-century middle-class life, without traditional class distinctions.

Critical Reactions

The contemporary press immediately recog- nized the radical-and innovative-nature of the exhibit. Max Terrier wrote in Art et decora-

tion, "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 demon- strated "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' admira- tion. They used the word "ingenious" repeat- edly. 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 suc- cess," 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 exhibi- tion space as well as a tendency of the French (especially in artistic circles) to be

nonchalant about privacy may have con- tributed to this silence.77

The critics' comments about the apart- ment'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 mate-

rials, 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 effec- tively, but one certainly could not enjoy one- self 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 par- ticular criticisms or endorsements, which fol- lowed predictable lines, but the degree of reflection that the exhibit elicited in the deco- rative-arts magazines (not generally known for their probing commentary). Sollar acknowl-

edged the provocative effect that it generated. After admitting that the designers had proba- bly 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 pub- lic'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 resem-

bles nothing that they like"; however, he then declared that Le Corbusier's ideas had a cer- tain 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 empti- ness of the external environment" and that this horror vacui was symptomatic of a lack of spir- itual 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 empti- ness 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 elimina- tion 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 rationaliza- tion had changed daily life. As Wenzel made

clear, this did not mean for the postwar gen- eration that individualism was no longer pos-

sible, 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: happi-

ness 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 about- that 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 mod- ern society necessitated the 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 tech- nology 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 echn~ logy .~~ However, 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.84 Perriand 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 dimen- sion, 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'

" LA VII ti

ADIEU ISE "

LA CELLULE DE 1 4 M2 PAR HABITANT

FIG 34

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).

designs lend themselves to mass production. A chaise longue with a canvas cover, for instance, was listed in a 1930 Thonet cata-

logue for 2,500 francs, approximately six times the cost of a wooden Morris lounge chair. Wealthy banker Raoul La Roche com- plained about the price of one of the proto- types 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 refine- ment 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 bour- geoisie, 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 fea- tured in the kitchen and bath were costly, and far beyond the reach of working-class resi- d 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.g0 The 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 resi-

dential 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

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 working- class 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

intellectual elite.92 Although none of the French commenta-

tors 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 unquali- fied enthusiasm for American industrial meth- ods as a social solution, and a year later he became involved in a small nonconformist movement, Regional Syndicalism, which rejected capitalism and parliamentary democ-

racy and embraced a diffuse program uniting prewar syndicalism (unionism), regionalism, industrial modernization, and spiritual regener- ation. 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 affil- iated 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.

Future Influence

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 1 4m2). Apartment for a couple w~ th three, four, f~ve, or six children

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 com- fortable, 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 equip- ment made it difficult for critics (and presum- ably Salon visitors) to ignore their innovations. Modern kitchen and bathroom fixtures were

presented not as luxuries but as basic neces- sities; 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 con- siderable 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 any- one to imagine a woman occupying the apart- ment 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 untradi- tional 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 possi- bilities 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 pr~minence .~~ Nowhere was this more apparent than in Le Corbusier's own work. Although he had long been attentive to ques-

tions of furniture and domestic arrangements, he now focused on kitchens as important res- idential 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 liv- ing 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.95 And 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 profes-

sional 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 promi- nence 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 pub- lished 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 Modernesg7 By the mid-1 930s, the kitchen had become an integral part of mod-

ern 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 hous- ing 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 d9Habitation in Marseilles (figs. 36, 37).

However important it was as a model of technological modernity and rationalization, the Salon dlAutomne apartment also sug- gested 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 out- moded 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 37

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND-ATELIER LE COR- B 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 expen- slve to include in the Un1tt5 dlHabltation. 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 integra- tion of the kitchen with the living room, by using a 'kitchen-bar,' simplifies all the functional activities whlle allowlng the housewife an ease of communica- tion with her family and friends. A successful experi- ment. Over the past thirty years, the kitchens have been updated with modern appl~ances, but the quall- ty of communication has remalned unchanged."