Who is Charlotte Perriand? (Part 2)

Welcome back to Part Two of our journey through the remarkable life of 20th-century design trailblazer Charlotte Perriand.

If you missed the beginning of her story, you can catch up here.

Charlotte is by now an independent young woman at the beginning of her 30s, looking for more than just sexual freedom. Next to shift is her professional relationship with modernist architect Le Corbusier. And the devastating consequences of the Second World War are looming on the horizon.

_|———|_ Charlotte leaves Le Corbusier’s studio

In 1934, Charlotte designs the furniture and interior fixtures for Le Corbusier’s new penthouse apartment on the Rue Nungesser-et-Coli. Located on the western edge of Paris, in the 16th arrondissement, it is one of the city’s most prestigious and affluent districts.

The design briefing Charlotte receives from Le Corbusier follows his “Couple” theory: Separate areas for Madame and Monsieur, linked by a corridor. That meant that Le Corbusier’s atelier was established in the eastern part of the penthouse while his wife Yvonne had her domain in the western part of the flat. Yvonne’s area conveniently included the kitchen, dining room and the couple’s bedroom. Le Corbusier’s eastern part was off limits for his wife.

The attentive reader might pause here and wonder if “her domain” should rather be re-read “domestic servant quarters destined for cooking, entertainment and sex”. Misogyny takes many forms. It’s not surprising that sexist ideas have been embedded in architects’ floorplans throughout history, given how often living spaces were designed to reinforce rigid gender roles. Second to none telling though is that, even if you see yourself as modernist, our archaic blind spots are often our most obvious failings.

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In 1936, Charlotte participates in the “Salon des Arts Ménagers”, an annual Parisian exhibition. The show is a major event attracting large numbers of visitors and exhibitors, and is designed to educate the French public about home decoration, furnishing and domestic management. What a different world without YouTube Video Manuals and AI search engines! The household appliances prove a game changer to promote both an automised workflow and its aesthetics. Charlotte benefits from this modernisation rush. Her design skills are required.

In the same year, France experiences a political shift. Radical socialist Leon Blum takes over. The 40-hour work week and paid vacation is made law. France is prepared to go on vacation! And Charlotte is ready, too. She develops a keen interest in affordable pre-fabricated buildings and furniture targeting the leisure seeking mass market. Her concepts span from mountain shelters, weekend retreat developments and tiny houses like her “Maison au Bord de l’Eau” (House by the Water) designed as holiday cabin.

Charlotte immerses herself in a site before starting a design. “I love being alone when I visit a country or historic site,” she writes. Her goals were a fundamental belief in a better world promoting society’s progress and creating a new art of living well, supported by socially conscious architecture and design.

First row left: Charlotte and friends install the Bivouac mountain shelter in 1936. First row right, above: A photomontage of the mountain shelter “Tonneau” which Charlotte designed with Pierre Jeanneret, 1938. First row right, bottom: The finished Bivouac mountain hut at Mont Joly, 1936. Second row, left: The Boomerang Desk and its ergonomic study, designed for JR Bloch, 1938. Second row, right: Furniture designed by Charlotte Perriand 1927-1937. Last row: House by the water, 1934, original designs and reconstructions based on her design (2013).

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The year 1937 will mark a significant turning point in her professional journey. Charlotte leaves Le Corbusier’s studio and more importantly leaves the dominant orbit of “Corbu” as she still calls him. There were arguments, there were differences in opinion. Charlotte is by now a 34-year-old confident woman. She is tired putting up with Corbu’s overpowering personality and his “monastery” as she calls his workshop where his rules have to be obeyed without questioning.

Reading Charlotte’s account of her separation from Le Corbusier, I was fascinated how balanced and unangrily she speaks about her former employer. Though Charlotte leaves in bad blood, she expresses empathy and gratefulness to Le Corbusier in her autobiography. The hindsight view of an autobiography and a mature age might have helped to mellow negative emotions. Time heals, as we say.

Charlotte later regrets her decision of having left burnt earth with Corbu, as she writes that she had “closed the door“, wishing she “would have left it open”. For her following interior design projects, Charlotte embarks on collaborations with Pablo Picasso, cubist painter Fernand Léger and Spanish artist Joan Miró.

“There is no formula for creation,” as she puts it, and does what her gut feeling tells her.

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And there is work on a ski resort in the Savoie! During a trip into her beloved mountains surrounding Val d‘Isère, Charlotte meets Peter Lindsay, a winter sports enthused Scot, and gets involved in his ambitious project. Lindsay is well connected in British society, he is a friend of Lord Mountbatton who is the uncle of Prince Philip, the darling husband of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Lindsay will later be known as the businessman who developed the largest connected ski area in the world, the skiing resort “Les Trois Vallées” stretching from Courchevel via Méribel to Val Thorens.

Charlotte is tasked with the interior decoration of the first hotel built in the until then untouched mountain range: Hotel Le Doron, in the village of Méribel Les Allues. With her lover Pierre Jeanneret still visiting her on the weekends, Charlotte yet again steps into a different world. She meets all sorts of wealthy, sporty and bohemian people during this project. International Tennis Champion, author and feminist Lilí de Álvarez is one of them.

Left: Hotel Doron interior designed by Charlotte. Right: Tennis champion and feminist Lili de Alvarez to whom Charlotte is introduced to when working at Méribel Les Allues.

_||_ Charlotte creates in Japan

With the Second World War casting its early shadows, Charlotte leaves the Savoie region and returns to Paris. She collaborates with Jean Prouvé, a skilled metalsmith blending design with engineering, to design prefabricated buildings. Primarily military barracks and temporary housing. Jean would be an important collaboration partner for Charlotte in the years to come.

Their partnership, however, is abruptly paused in 1940, as another major chapter begins to unfold in Charlotte’s life.

She receives an invitation from the Japanese Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Would she be interested in acting as the official advisor on industrial design to the Japanese government? Charlotte accepts and leaves for Tokyo.

Sakakura, a former colleague at Le Corbusier’s atelier, was instrumental in offering Charlotte her new position as “Consultant in industrial art to the Trade Division of the Imperial Ministry of Trade and Industry of Japan”. Her salary was 100,000 Francs a year plus fees and travel expenses, in today’s money $48,000 per year.

It wasn’t an easy decision for her. She didn’t want to leave Paris. It meant leaving her lover Pierre behind and abandoning Paris in the war, so it is not surprising that Charlotte sees herself patriotically as “French cultural ambassador”.

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Charlotte sails for Japan. The journey on ship “Hakusan Maru” was in hindsight one big adventure during war times. The first stop is Marseille where she goes aboard to visit friends and almost misses the boat leaving for Japan. Not a good start, she panics. Hers is one of the final ships to depart from France’s South Coast before the arrival of the Nazis.

The next leg is Lisbon. As the Suez Canal is closed due to the war, the voyage continues to Gibraltar, then along the African Coast and after twenty-one days, they reach the Cape of Good Hope.

“Leaving means Forging ahead,” she tells herself.

Bombay, Ceylon, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Shanghai are more stops. One of her ship travel stories recalls their anchoring in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay). Under British rule, countries practiced ethnic segregation and so her Japanese co-travellers, eager to pass the time abroad the ship during their stay, had to find a golf course for coloured people outside of Mumbai.

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Arriving in Tokyo, Charlotte finds an international design-oriented Japan. German architect Bruno Taut was directing the School of Industrial Art, while the technical department of the Trade and Industry Ministry was under supervision of a Mr. Yamawaki, who had studied at the Bauhaus school in Germany.

Charlotte emerges herself in Tokyo’s French community, teaches industrial design and arranges an exhibition of current design affairs. She connects with an elite group of international designers.

When trying to leave Japan via the US after a year, one of her American expat friends supports her with visa issues. This was no other than James Johnson Sweeney, later Head of MoMA in New York.

First row left: Charlotte arriving in Japan in 1940, and on her left Junzo Sakakura. First row right: A sailor’s drawing on deck of the ship Hakusan Maru which brought Charlotte from France to Japan and would become Charlotte’s carpet design for her Tokyo exhibition, 1940. Bottom row: Charlotte’s design arrangements for her exhibition “Contact with Japanese art” Osaka, 1941.

_|=|_ Charlotte becomes a mother in Vietnam

During her stay in Japan, another invitation arrives. It is December 1941 and Vietnam’s Ministry of Trade and Industry announces her arrival in Hanoi with lavish press releases.

Back then, Vietnam is still a French colony called Indochina comprising today’s Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. In line with how many great powers used colourful language to legitimise colonial exploitation, France labelled Indochina a “protectorate”.

On her first days in Hanoi, Charlotte goes hunting with her fellow French expats. While chasing down tigers and shooting a stag, Japan enters the war by attacking Pearl Harbor.

On dangerous ways, she manages to get back to Tokyo where she hopes to catch an evacuation ship back to France. While waiting, Charlotte decides there is no harm in going skiing for a month to kill time. The nerve!

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The ship to France never arrives. She is trapped. Air raids in Tokyo and her alien status force her back to Vietnam.

Early 1943, she is back in Hanoi where she had been offered a Lecture Assignment at the Directorate of Economic Affairs to help promote Vietnam’s traditional crafts’ industry. Going directly there wouldn’t have been Charlotte’s style. Before starting her new job, she sets out to Saigon, visits Phnom Penh and explores the excavations of Angkor Wat. When the bus breaks down on this journey, she sleeps under the stars in a village.

While on assignment, she crosses paths with a Frenchman called Jacques Martin. He is the Director of French Economic Affairs in Indochina and one of her employers. The next thing I know, while reading her autobiography, is that she marries him a few months later. Surprise!

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Once again, as with her first husband, Charlotte doesn’t disclose any personal circumstances under which they met, or how she felt. “Two polar opposites united en route to adventure,” is the only statement Charlotte gives away in her autobiography. It appears that love stories or tales of infatuation haven’t made it into her writings. She chooses instead to describe in detail that she married Jacques Martin in Da Lat, the “City of Eternal Spring” with its distinctive temperate climate on the Langbian Plateau in Vietnam’s Central Highlands.

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A year later, Charlotte is 41 years old, her daughter Pernette is born in Hanoi. She had almost lost the baby carrying heavy crates and unpacking items for an exhibition. In Charlotte’s memoirs, her husband isn’t mentioned. I don’t know if he was with her when the baby was born.

During an airstrike, the bedroom windows shatter. Thinking quickly, a Chinese servant girl uses the bathtub to cover the baby’s cradle before diving for shelter herself. Charlotte is overwhelmed. She wasn’t the one who protected her baby. Does she have what it takes to be a mother? She loses her happy-go-lucky attitude.

To join her husband and escape to a cooler climate, Charlotte makes her way to the mountainous city of Da Lat. During their journey, she lives through the horror of Japanese and American air raids. Charlotte and her little daughter are detained by the Japanese and both get seriously ill.

Left: Charlotte with her daughter Pernette. Right: The rise of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, 1945

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On 10 March 1945, France loses control over Indochina as protectorate.

On 21 August 1945, Japan surrenders.

Finally, Charlotte reunites with her husband Jacques who was a civilian prisoner. He is sick and in bad shape.

Charlotte experiences the rise of Vietnamese revolutionary Nguyen Ai Quoc to political stardom. Better known as Ho Chi Minh, he is the first president of an independent Vietnam. “Down with the French. Down with colonisation. Long live our allies, the English and Americans, death to the French,” Ho Chi Minh proclaims when establishing his new communist government which would replace both French rule and the Nguyen lords, the last feudal Vietnamese dynasty.

Under attack by revolutionary Vietnamese troops, she narrowly escapes the violent uprisings in former expat neighbourhoods. In Saigon, the Viet Minh (supporters of Ho Chi Minh fighting colonial France) raid the house where Charlotte is hiding.

What will happen to Charlotte and her family? Read Part Three.

©  photos: DR/Archives Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP, Paris