The daughter of a tailor and a seamstress, she presented herself to Le Corbusier asking for a job and he told her, “We don’t embroider cushions here.” A year later, seeing her work in an exhibit, Corbu hired her on the spot. She spent ten years working under him, a man notorious for being cold and difficult. There’s that famous 1930 photograph of her, her back to the camera, her shirt off, standing in front of a snowy mountain range, with her arms raised over her head. She believed design could be both beautiful and functional. In the beginning, she embraced the age of the machine, with her ball bearing necklace and phenomenal 1928 metal chaise lounge. Another iconic image: her reclining in the chaise lounge in a pleated skirt, her shadow cast on the wall. After spending time in Japan, and six years exiled in Vietnam, she redesigned her chaise lounge in bamboo in 1940. Returning to France, she foraged for driftwood, stone, bone, and designed a triform base table with tabletops in irregular, organic shapes. Her philosophy: “the extension of the art of dwelling is the art of living.” The through-line in her career was an insistence that design could be practical, ergonomic, and aesthetic, without sacrificing one quality for the other.
-Morgan English