Designers
& architects

One might think that interior furnishings were a minor concern for Le Corbusier, the utopian architect who dreamed of fitting a whole city into a single building, much like slipping caravels into a bottle of rum. With his Voisin Plan of 1925, he would have gladly reduced Paris to a score of towers—yet always with the genuine intent of improving modern man’s living conditions.

Up until the 1920s, his built works were far fewer than his theoretical writings. He excelled above all in the art of the slogan and in wielding polemic as a tool to accelerate recognition.

The studio reached its first true peak in 1922, when he was joined by his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. Le Corbusier rejected the visual excess of plaster-laden façades and the “impure ornaments” of backward-looking decoration.

For him, “art is harmony, not décor.” A vision he formalized in The Decorative Art of Today (1925). In a house “as practical as a typewriter,” furniture was conceived first and foremost as “servants,” combining comfort, mobility, and durability in line with the demands of modernism.

From 1924, the two cousins worked on “machines for sitting,” even finding inspiration in medical equipment. Then, in 1927, Charlotte Perriand joined the studio, marking the beginning of ten years of rich collaboration.