Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand
Before he won international acclaim as an architect, Le Corbusier was mainly a designer of furniture and interiors. After moving to Paris and in 1920 adopting the name Le Corbusier, he began investigating the genealogy of objects of everyday use and the question of how to purify their forms. He defined a series of objets types – anonymous, industrially made objects, each representing a particular function – for his own personal use. By the time the young interior designer Charlotte Perriand joined them in late 1927, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret had already sketched a wide range of different chair models for different sitting positions, which they presumably intended to develop using modern materials and a contemporary language of forms.
Of the soon-to-be-world-famous tubular steel furniture developed the following year, the Fauteuil à dossier basculant shown here comes closest to one of the objets types – the Colonial chair – Le Corbusier held in such high esteem. The trio combined its formal features with a contemporary logic of forms and design. The tubular steel seat frame, welded at first, was fitted with a construction of Z-profiles and a suspension made of wire mesh and metal springs for the down-filled cushion to rest on. The back cushion was slipped over the tilting backrest.
When their new furniture line debuted at the 1929 Salon d’automne in Paris, Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Perriand had created both this deluxe version (exécution de luxe) and a plainer one (exécution de série), whose tubular steel frame was slung with the short-haired hides of stillborn calves or canvas instead of a suspension. Since Thonet Frères had agreed to finance the atelier’s 9×10-metre stand at the Salon d’automne, which was a studio apartment made entirely of glass, plaster, and metal, it was offered exclusive rights to the new models. From 1930 the company made some 350 leather- or canvas-slung copies of the B 301 chairs (as shown here) and a much smaller number of the upholstered deluxe version.
The trio’s iconic creations (not just the Fauteuil à dossier basculant, but also the Chaise longue à position variable and two versions of the Fauteuil grand confort) were reissued in 1959–64 by the Zurich-based Heidi Weber. She transferred her licence to the Italian firm Cassina in 1965, which engaged Perriand as a consultant in 1978. She initiated and oversaw an expansion of the range and the addition of many new colours and materials.
Text: Arthur Rüegg
