It is early morning in Paris. She opens her bathroom window and climbs on the roof of her apartment. A deep breath, a quick look over the neighbourhood of Montparnasse. She stretches, moves her head in a wide circle and starts exercising in the fresh air. After half an hour, she returns to her one-bedroom flat under the roof. The tiny apartment is quirky.
Once a photographer’s studio, the space is creatively arranged with unusually designed furniture. A knock on the door. Her neighbour Fernand Léger comes over for breakfast. Like almost every morning. She met Fernand during a reception at the German embassy, an event that also brought her into contact with the progressive architect Walter Gropius and the entire Bauhaus team.
Gossip, lovers, food, art. Lots to talk and joke about before she’ll be off again, travelling to Moscow and then Athens to join an international congress for architects. While preparing coffee, she recalls her adventurous kayaking trip around the Balearic Island of Majorca. Four hundred and fifty kilometres of physical effort and emotional strain travelling with Percy.
Enough, it’s done, she thinks and turns around. She excitedly tells her neighbour and friend Fernand about the Taygetus mountain range she is planning to climb in Southern Greece. But shush! It’s a secret. She will sneak away and leave the congress early. She wants to spend time with her lover in the wilds while her boss and colleagues will still be pondering on urban design and planning strategies. Fernand laughs and shakes his head in approving disbelief. Only she would dare, this is typical of his dear friend. A woman after his heart!
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This adventurous woman, who lived life on her own terms and would ultimately write design history, was Charlotte Perriand. Her life easily provides enough material for an adventure film, yet one would have to create an action-movie-slash-design-documentary to live up to her primary mission of changing architecture and design paradigms of the 20th century.
How could such a feature about Charlotte Perriand’s fascinating life of creation unfold? It might start like this.
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Paris, the year is 1903.
Charlotte Perriand is born into the last years of France’s Belle Époque. Charlotte is an only child. Her father: A non-conformist, self-made man who had left his native mountain village to pursue a career as tailor in Paris. Her mother: An independent, working woman who owns a seamstress workshop priding herself on craft excellence and consistent quality of her sewing creations.
“Work, Charlotte, work. Work is freedom”, young Charlotte is told. Leading by example, the mother instils a passionate work ethos into Charlotte and makes her value one’s autonomy, in particular as a woman in a man’s world.
_|\/|_ Charlotte grows up in Paris
Charlotte’s parents represent the Golden Age of continental Europe. Wedged between the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, this rather short-lived Belle Époque was Europe’s optimistic and creative gasp of relief at the end of the 19th century. Peace! Enlightenment! Prosperity! Technological Innovations! Paris exploded with cultural abundance in literature, music, theatre and the visual arts. And this was the Paris into which Charlotte Perriand was born. Charlotte’s first years were the happy-go-lucky result of two hard-working optimists as parents.
The outbreak of World War I is interrupting her childhood. Charlotte is eleven years old and the family is getting by. With a scholarship arranged through her aunt, Charlotte attends the Trade School of Decorative Arts where she studies the applied arts as well as painting and drawing.
Charlotte’s parents support her financially after she turns eighteen. In 1926, when Charlotte is 23 years old, she convinces her parents to finance her first exhibition “Coin de Salon” for which she designs a small living room. The same year, Charlotte marries.
_|=|_ Charlotte marries an Englishman
Charlotte is used to financial freedom and protection through her parents and so, as she laxly describes in her autobiography, she decides to marry an English man called Percy Kilner Scholefield. She doesn’t write of love or infatuation. Hindsight might have a sobering effect.
Charlotte’s first husband Percy is twenty years her senior. A wealthy Englishman, he specialises on textile imports, speaks several languages and is an expert skier drawn to the Alps long before the existence of any ski resorts. Percy is a shadowy figure in the background of Charlotte’s life. He might have been involved in covert activities during WWII as a source suggests, yet those are obtuse references. I find it likely that Percy had greater influence on Charlotte than her autobiography lets on. Business acumen, internationality, self-confidence, those might have been some side effects of their six years’ lasting relationship.
The newly-married couple moves to an attic apartment at Place Saint-Sulpice, a large public square in the chic Parisian heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The flat under the roof had been a photographer’s studio and boasts generous big windows overlooking the square.
Presumably with her husband Percy as financial sponsor, this bohemian abode becomes Charlotte’s first big project. She converts it into a “machine age” interior. Soon to be framed in a more prominent context, her iconic “Bar under the Roof” (Bar sous le Toit) was born.
On the left: Charlotte and Le Corbusier’s hand (holding a halo over her head). On the right: Charlotte with her husband Percy behind her in the background, at their Place Saint-Sulpice studio apartment, with Le Corbusier on her left and Jean Fouquet on the far right, 1928.
_||_ Charlotte celebrates her first success
Studying at the Decorative Arts School, Charlotte seemed to have already mastered the art of securing early mentors. She is clever, doesn’t keep things to herself and asks for advice.
Jean Fouquet, a famous 1920s jewellery designer, recommends reading the works of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known under his pseudonym “Le Corbusier”, a Swiss-French architect and urban planner. Nowadays regarded as one of the controversial pioneers of modern architecture, young Charlotte is fascinated with Le Corbusier’s modernist design language.
An afternoon in October 1927, Charlotte plucks up the courage to visit Le Corbusier’s studio. She asks for a job.
After browsing through her drawings, Le Corbusier famously rebuffs her with the misogynist comment “We don’t embroider cushions here” and shows her the door. Charlotte might have been deflated by this condescending rejection, yet she leaves her card with him regardless. Later that year Charlotte invites Le Corbusier to her show at the “Salon d’Automne”, an annual Parisian art exhibition.
Originally installed in Charlotte’s and Percy’s attic apartment, her “Bar under the Roof” design showcases her modernist steel and chrome furniture and is an overnight success at the Salon d’Automne art fair. Hordes of journalists are chasing her. Charlotte is young, pretty, outspoken and female. She stands out in the male-dominated design sphere of the 1920s. All of a sudden, Charlotte becomes art paparazzi material!
On the left: Bar Under the Roof, 1927. On the right: Design Drawing of Bar Under the Roof and Dining Room Design, 1927
_|——|_ Charlotte works for Le Corbusier
Once Le Corbusier has seen her seminal exhibition installation, he invites Charlotte to join his studio at Rue de Sèvres to design furniture and interiors for him. Et voilà! She is in.
Working with Le Corbusier will be shaping her. The job is hard, inspirational and opens her eyes to modernist ideas while working in an international environment. Japanese architects Kunio Maekawa and Junzo Sakakura, the Swiss architect Alfred Roth, and Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin and Charlotte’s lover-to-be, were her inner circle. No one in the studio is paid a regular salary. Charlotte continues to work as a freelancer and her husband Percy is supporting her financially.
“I was wrapping my feet in newspaper in winter so I wouldn’t feel my feet turn into ice,” Charlotte recalls in her autobiography. Feeling part of a heroic pioneering age, no money and very few resources, that was the mood of her first years with “Corbu” (as she calls Le Corbusier).
Charlotte immerses herself in contextual architecture—design that considers and integrates a building’s specific environment. Her husband Percy funds private architecture lessons with fellow Corbu employee architect Alfred Roth.
In her first year at Le Corbusier, it is 1928, Charlotte designs chairs, built-in storage units and tables for the studio’s architectural projects. Three chairs will become iconic modernist designs and are reproduced by different companies until today. For the design buffs amongst us: Those are the LC2 Grand Confort armchair, the B301 reclining chair and the B306 chaise longue. Sources are quick to state that Charlotte had designed those chairs together with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. On other occasions, the chairs’ design is solely attributed to Le Corbusier.
The coming years see her designing interiors for major architectural projects including the Villa Church, the Villa Savoye, the Pavillon Suisse at the Cité Universitaire, a university campus in Paris, and the Cité du Réfuge, a homeless shelter for the French Salvation Army.
Working on the refuge accommodation had a profound impact on Charlotte. She sees the suffering first hand when she researches for the project in police stations. Instead of beds, the rough sleepers were given the length of a taut rope that was hooked to a wall. To sleep, they would rest their heads and forearms on the rope. The next morning the “bed” ropes were simply unhooked, rudely awakening the unfortunate sleepers. The new Salvation Army housing project would change all that inhumane callousness!
The time she doesn’t spend working in Corbu’s workshop, she uses to expand her network and further her own design related projects. She co-founds the French Union of Modern Artists (UAM), a progressively thinking group of designers and architects. She embarks on a research project photographing objects found in nature or industrial sites looking for unexpected forms, her “Art Brut” project. She travels to pre-Nazi Germany, visits student friends and meets designers who would become titans of modern architecture: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, Adolf Loos. She continues her travels to Moscow where she attends a modern architecture conference. She spends many weeks in Moscow and visits the “Centro Soyuz” building site, a Russian government structure and one of her projects at Le Corbusier’s practice.
Though initially drawn to the political idea of communism, she is shocked about Moscow’s desolate economic situation and its starved population in the aftermath of the communist revolution. “Troublesome times were simmering below the surface,” she comments in her memoirs about her eye-opening trip to Germany and Russia.
Top on the left: Charlotte in her Chaise longue basculante B306, 1928. Top on the right: Collecting found objects on a beach, and with her colleague Maekawa at Le Corbusier atelier. 1928. Bottom on the left: Atelier Le Corbusier at Rue Sevres in Paris, 1928. And her furniture design for Villa Church, 1928. Bottom on the right: Charlotte at the Athens CIAM congress, with Fernand Leger on the left, Le Corbusier in the centre and Pierre Jeanneret on the right of Le Corbusier, 1933.
_|\/|_ Charlotte is a free spirit
Charlotte was a sportsperson, and being in nature helped her reset. “I would set off with backpack, sleeping in my tent all summer, or build igloos in winter with a Duralumin showel and saw.” She enjoyed spending time outdoors and made ample use of the whole month of August when Corbu’s atelier was closed.
Kayaking. Mountaineering. Skiing. Sailing. Trekking. Fishing. Swimming in the Sea at midnight. Dancing in the Village Square to gypsy music. Skinny Dipping. Sleeping outside. Charlotte wanted freedom and feel alive.
There’s a telling story I find quite amusing. In 1931, while visiting fellow architects in Cologne, Charlotte has one of her “crazy notions”. Night falls. “Might swim in the Rhine?” she thinks—and jumps in. The current is strong, but she’s an athlete. She pushes through, finally emerging a full kilometre downstream. Naked, she walks back to her friends, as if nothing had happened.
Acting out her creative drive and thirsting for self-determination seemed to guide young Charlotte. Social influence and inspiring role model for many young women at the time was performer Josephine Baker. Famed for her “Danse Sauvage” in which Baker sported a minimalist look with an artificial banana skirt, Baker broke with traditional conventions and challenged societal norms.
Delicate detail on the side: In 1929, on an ocean liner en route from South America to France, it is rumoured that Baker had an affair with Le Corbusier. Further speculation exists that Baker was also involved with legendary women like night club owner and performer Ada “Bricktop” Smith, French novelist Colette, and Frida Kahlo.
Charlotte in her element in the Alps and on the beach, 1930s. Bottom on the right: Performer Josephine Baker was an inspiring role model for many young women in the 1920s.
_|\/|_ Charlotte’s marriage breaks down and she takes a lover
Charlotte is not yet thirty when, during a kayaking trip around the island of Majorca, the final rupture with her husband occurs. “Drunk on freedom,” she describes herself in her autobiography, Charlotte stays behind in a little village and parties while her husband Percy continues the kayaking loop.
Percy is deeply upset. “The cord’s snapped, sweetheart, and you’re the one who’s pulled too hard,” he says to her. They divorce in 1932. Maybe the age gap showed, maybe he was too controlling, maybe she just wasn’t into him anymore, maybe she was already in love with someone else. Whatever happened, it became apparent their life attitudes had diverged.
Charlotte leaves Percy and her creations behind in their apartment. The Bar under the Roof, her drawings, her designed furniture, all of it. She moves to the south of Paris, to Montparnasse, and feels as if a weight has been lifted off her shoulders: “I moved with two plates, two forks, two saucepans (one to wash the other in), and a broom.. happy as a lark.”
Her new abode in Montparnasse is once again set against the backdrop of a photographer’s old studio. It is a quirky little apartment under the roof. Occupying her own space and living next door to modernist painter Fernand Léger, who would eventually be hailed as a pioneer of Pop Art, is a milestone as Charlotte begins the next chapter of her life.
On the left: Charlotte’s flat in Montparnasse, after her divorce from Percy, 1932. On the right: Charlotte’s lover Pierre Jeanneret, she has playfully drawn on his passport photos, 1930s.
Shortly after her divorce, it might have been around October 1932, Pierre Jeanneret becomes Charlotte’s lover. Pierre is Le Corbusier’s cousin and business partner. It is possible their romantic involvement began earlier. From Charlotte’s autobiography we know that Le Corbusier is vexed when Pierre and Charlotte make their relationship official.
“Nothing was ever the same again with Corbu,” Charlotte remembers, “it was as if I’d hurt him, why or how I have never known.” Couldn’t Le Corbusier hide his disappointment when his cousin got the girl, a case of hurt male pride? Or maybe Corbu was simply jealous of Charlotte spending so much time with his beloved cousin. The two men shared such a close bond. Not only did the cousins have a business together, they also lived in the same building in bohemian Saint-Germain-des-Prés for twenty-two years!
Some years later, it is 1936, Charlotte’s and Pierre’s relationship has solidified and he moves in Charlotte’s flat in Montparnasse. Pierre is quiet, unselfish, warm-hearted. Fernand Léger comes almost every morning for breakfast. Josep Lluís Sert, a Catalan architect with artist friends called Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Alexander Calder, seeks refuge in Charlotte’s studio during the Spanish Civil War which is raging on the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 1930s.
In Montparnasse, Charlotte experiences a bohemian co-living set up. Exciting times!
Yet the future is clouded. With the Second World War looming on the horizon, Charlotte’s world is about to be turned upside down.
What lies ahead for Charlotte? Read Part Two.
© all photos: DR/Archives Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP, Paris