This obituary was originally published on Nov. 7, 1999. It is being republished for a package for Women’s History Month.
Charlotte Perriand, the French designer who created furniture with Le Corbusier in the 1920’s and 30’s and was rediscovered as a modernist legend in her own right in the 1980’s and 90’s, died at her home in Paris on Oct. 27. She was 96.
Through a productive career spanning eight decades, Ms. Perriand designed tubular “equipment for living” with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, bamboo furniture in Japan, lobbies for Air France in London and Tokyo, workers’ housing in the Sahara and ski resort interiors in the French Alps.
Her ideas about flexible space, free-form shapes, natural materials and furniture designed to make “space sing” made her a modernist with a humanist agenda. The legs on her dining table were splayed, for example, so that people sitting at the ends could stretch their legs.
Preferring to be known as an interior architect instead of a furniture designer, Ms. Perriand subscribed to the modernist notion that furnishings and architecture needed to be developed as a single entity.
Her collaborations were often especially productive. The primary-colored bookcase with cupboards painted by Sonia Delaunay for the dormitory for Tunisian students at the Cité Universitaire in Paris and the lighting table (table and fluorescent overhead lights in one) she designed with Jean Prouvé in 1953 are prized by collectors and sometimes reproduced without authorization.
“For nearly three quarters of a century, Perriand has been one of the major innovators in French design, and her career embraces much of the history of 20th-century design in France,” said Mary McLeod, an architectural historian at Columbia University.
Ms. Perriand was born in Paris on Oct. 24, 1903. Her early talent for drawing led her to the École de l’Union Central des Arts Décoratifs. By 1926 she had been selected to exhibit her work at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs, from which the name of the Art Deco movement derives.
Her “bar under the roof,” an installation featuring a built-in chrome-walled bar counter and card table with pool-pocket drink holders, caused a sensation at the 1927 Salon d’Automne and established her as an avant-garde talent to watch.
Believing that she had nowhere to go but to the top, as she told Roger Aujame, a friend and former Corbusier Foundation director who is working on a catalog of her works, Ms. Perriand sought a job at Le Corbusier’s studio. His initial withering response, “We don’t embroider cushions here,” has become part of modernist lore. But once he went to see her bar installation, Le Corbusier hired her on the spot.
The years from 1927 to 1937 that she spent working with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret were formative and soon, like Corbusier, Ms. Perriand was making manifesto-style declarations about “the new man” and wearing her signature necklace of steel ball bearings. But it was her love of nature, especially the mountains where she often retreated, and her pragmatism that tempered the strict angularities of their furniture classics like the chaise longue and the famous cube-shaped Grand Confort chair.
In 1940 Ms. Perriand was invited to Japan, where she used traditional materials like bamboo, pine and woven straw to make modern shapes. When war broke out, she moved to Vietnam; unable to get a return visa to France, she worked for the colonial government. There she met Jacques Martin, a local official, whom she married in 1943. (An earlier, brief marriage in 1926 ended in divorce.) The couple had one daughter in 1944, Pernette Perriand, now an architect in Paris. Mr. Martin died in 1986.
Ms. Perriand returned to Paris in 1946 and was soon working on a wide range of projects, from ski resorts to student housing. Fiercely independent, she rejected frequent requests to furnish interiors designed by other architects. But she was eager to work with Mr. Prouvé, the designer and manufacturer who collaborated with her and produced several of her designs from 1951 to 1953. She also collaborated again with Le Corbusier on the Unité d’Habitation housing project in Marseilles.
Ms. Perriand continued to travel to Japan and Brazil for inspiration, but spent much of her time from 1967 to 1982 working on the Arcs, a vast compound of ski resorts in the Alps.
In the 1980’s the retrospectives of her work began, first at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1985 and then at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Design Museum in London in 1996 and the Architectural League in Manhattan in 1997. But Ms. Perriand looked ahead, not back, and at the time of her death was exploring the possibilities of new materials for the 21st century.
At a league lecture, Ms. Perriand told the young design students there, “We are leaving the age of oak and entering a period that will be defined by lightness, suppleness and the ephemeral.”
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