Changing the way we talk about women in design
The LC7 Chair at the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center, March 2022.
We need to fix the way we talk about the contribution of women in design professions.
Last week I viewed The Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center’s exhibition, The Modern Chair, and I was surprised that instead of information about Charlotte Perriand’s 1927 work, LC7, the museum included the following text:
“A young and nervous Charlotte Perriand arrived in Paris at the atelier of her idol, architect Le Corbousier, holding many of her furniture sketches. ‘What do you want?’ he asker her sternly. She explained she designed furniture and wanted to show him her drawings. ‘We don’t embroider cushions here,’ he replied, voicing a sterotypical feminine cliche. Eventually he was convinced of her merit as a designer, and more than 10 years she worked alongside Le Corbousier and Pierre Jeaneret, Le Corbousier’s cousin and business partner. One of Corbu’s famous declarations was that a house was a ‘machine for living.’ Accordingly, Perriand interpreted the modern chair as a ‘machine for sitting.’ Her innovative modern designs were the perfect complement to Le Corbousier’s revolutionary architecture.”
I was disappointed that a person who contributed so much to design and architecture would be reduced to her adjacency to and mistreatment by a male hero architect. The museum had the opportunity to contextualize this piece as one part of an impressive career and ten year collaboration, but fell short of doing so by failing to mention any of Perriand’s later works. In calling attention to the discrimination a female designer faced early in her career, PSAM reinforced Le Corbousier’s (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) ignorance by quoting him directly and failing to mention how important her contributions were to Le Corbousier’s studio and legacy. With Le Corbousier and Jeanneret, Perriand designed some of the most iconic furniture of the 20th century, including the Siège à dossier basculant (Armchair with a Tilting Back), the Fauteuil grand confort (Easy Chair), and the Chaise Longue (numbers 2-4).
What is most troubling about this framing is that it implies that women are no longer subject to gender discrimination or lowered expectations in the workplace. Yet, most women currently working in design have stories about being volunteered for non-promotable tasks — such as marketing, administration, social media management, and intern coordination — more frequently than their male peers. There are still tasks that are seen as “women’s work,” even if we are no longer talking about embroidering cushions.
Charlotte Perriand on the Chaise Longue.
During Women’s History Month (and beyond), we must look not just at the past and how those stories are told, but how we are describing the role of women on projects in present day. We frequently talk about women who gain notoriety after working with famous men as “stepping out of their shadow.” Instead of asking women to more forcefully insert themselves into the narrative of design history, I think we need to look at removing the bright spotlight on a singular figure that casts such a dark shadow to begin with. Architecture and design are only successful with a group effort, so we need to be critical of works that are credited to a figurehead alone and question the hierarchies and dynamics that make us so prone to this default.
The power dynamic between men who are in charge and the women who work for them is reinforced when we describe the (usually) elder man as a genius and the (usually) younger woman as just happy to be here. In the PSAM text, Le Corbousier is described as “her idol” and Perriand is characterized as “young and nervous.” Corbousier had to be “convinced of her merit as a designer.” Compare the description above with that of architecture historian and theorist Mary McLeod in her essay “Domestic Reform and European Modern Architecture: Charlotte Perriand, Grete Lihotzy, and Elizabeth Denby”:
“When she first approached [Le Corbousier] in October 1927 for a position, his response was hardly encouraging: “We don’t embroider cushions in my studio.” But something about the determined young woman must have captured his imagination, and a month later he visited her stand at the Salon d’Automne. By December she was working in the atelier.”
McLeod’s retelling of the encounter (she spoke directly with Perriand about the Le Corbousier meeting) and subsequent working relationship describes a woman who was rebuffed, but went on to exhibit Bar sous le toit (Bar in the attic) at the Salon d’Automne “with gleaming aluminum- and nickel-coated surfaces, glass shelves, and brightly colored leather cushions; a witty synthesis of casual bohemianism and chic luxury, it was widely praised in the professional press.” It was after others also recognized her talent that she was offered a position working for Le Corbousier. As Joseph Giovannini wrote in the New York Times, “He changed his mind after seeing an exhibit of her work at the Autumn Salon, where her streamlined, steel-zinc-and-glass ‘Bar in the Attic’… was captivating Paris.”
While PSAM describes “her innovative modern designs” as the “perfect complement to Le Corbousier’s “revolutionary architecture,” others saw Perriand as a revolutionary in her own right. Upon the opening of an exhibition celebrating her achievements in 2019, Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World, The Fondation Louis Vuitton described her as follows:
“She was an exceptional personality, a woman committed to leading a veritable evolution, or perhaps more aptly, a revolution. Her keen observation and vision of the world and its cultural and artistic expressions place her at the heart of a new order that introduced new relationships between the arts themselves – from architecture and painting to sculpture – as well as between the world’s most diverse cultures, from Asia (Japan, Vietnam and other countries) to Latin America, notably Brazil. Her work resonated with changes in the social and political order, the evolution of the role of women and changes in attitudes towards urban living.”
Charlotte Perriand
The LC7 was a work Perriand designed in 1927 before she was employed by Le Corbousier, but he and Jeanneret share the credit since it was exhibited under the “LC” collection at the 1929 Salon d’Automne. Properly crediting the work of female designers has historically been done poorly, if at all. Other women in the field, such as Ray Eames, have benefitted from a contemporary disintegration of gender norms that allow for her design contributions to be properly recognized as a true partnership with her husband, Charles.
The stories of the women who were able to achieve success in architecture never seem to be told as frequently as those of the charismatic, white, men, with rigidly held beliefs that are upheld as singular geniuses in popular culture and architecture history classrooms alike. A recent push to tell the stories of women in design has led to projects such as the New Angle: Voice podcast, where the contributions of female architects are thoroughly researched and well-told. A recent episode on Natalie de Blois, a design leader at SOM during the mid 20th century, mentioned briefly that she was fired from Ketchum, Gina, and Sharp after rejecting the advances of a male partner. The majority of the episode detailed her contributions to the Pepsi Cola Headquarters and Union Carbide buildings in New York, her work with Chicago Women in Architecture, and her role as an educator at UT Austin. de Blois unfairly faced a career setback based on her gender early in her career, but it did not define the work she went on to build or the people she inspired.
Not every female designer gets a forty-eight minute podcast to contextualize her work in the time it was created. Knowing this, we must be careful to responsibly discuss these designers on their own merits instead of their proximity to and acceptance by the male folk heroes of modern architecture. Centering the story of a woman’s career on her mistreatment instead of her unique contributions to the profession does a disservice to the legacy of the designer and erases her design achievements from our collective memory.