Charlotte Perriand
“When I was 10 years old I was admitted to hospital (...) I liked the place, it was white, the bare room overlooked a courtyard with trees and plants (...) When I returned home, the capernaum of furniture and objects struck me immediately and I cried. The minimalist style of the hospital suited me, for the first time I unconsciously discovered emptiness, almighty given it can contain everything"
This thought reflects the essence of an extraordinary woman and designer who, throughout her career, managed to make herself heard in a society which was still less inclined to acknowledge the merits of women designing products which were to become more important design icons than those produced today. Charlotte Perriand, for this and so much more, is regarded as one of the most important and influential designers in the history of contemporary design.
Perriand was born in Paris in 1903 and approached the design at an early age, graduating in 1925 at theEcole de l'Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs. In that same year she presented her first furniture collection at the Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris. A couple of years later, in 1927, and whilst still very young, she joined the most prestigious design workshop in the world: the Le Corbusier workshop. This experience was crucial to her growth and her career as, together with Pierre Jeanneret, she shared a vision of a design placed at the service of people and experimented the use of new materials and new production techniques mainly for series production solutions.
The years spent with these two design masters came to a peak with the creation of some of the most iconic and representative products, not only for that period of time, but in the whole history of design presented during the Salon d'Automne in 1929. We are talking about the iconic LC1, LC2 and LC4 designed using an innovative steel tubular structure, a cutting-edge material at that time.
The many travels and experiences gained throughout her career contributed to making Charlotte Perriand a highly revolutionary and brilliant woman thanks to her pure and concrete approach to design placed at the service of people. A life dedicated not only to the design of products, but also to a variety of different creative areas such as interior architecture, urbanism, painting, sculptures and even photography. An existence which we might say was dedicated to others, to the welfare of the people who encountered her art and her works.
