Charlotte Perriand

"With a portfolio of drawings under her arm and the courage of an Amazon preparing to face a fateful endeavor, Charlotte Perriand enters the Parisian studio of architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret at 35 rue de Sèvres. Charlotte is twenty-four years old, at the beginning of her career, and she absolutely wants to work with them."

This is the opening scene - almost a still frame holding back the flow of life - with which CHARLOTTE PERRRIAND begins, the first monograph of the FUORI DALL’OMBRA series that marinonibooks dedicates to the lives of the great European pioneers of architecture and design. A dual composition in which the words of Gisella Bassanini and Giovanna Canzi, and the images by Emi Ligabue, outline the profile of a woman suspended between innovation and tradition, between West and East, between war and peace. A woman whose life was like a river born from the confluence of a thousand streams. In her, we find a love for the mountains and nature, the warrior instinct that allowed her to fulfill her desires, the steel sweetness that constituted the stylistic hallmark of her projects (including the revolutionary Chaise longue basculante), the attraction to industrial reality and mass production, and at the same time, the love for Japan, where she stayed for a long time during World War II. Charlotte Perriand, as Adele Cassina recalls in the afterword, was endowed with a very personal kindness, made of attention to others, a characteristic typical of the virtue of humility that, contrary to how it is understood today, belongs only to the great. A vital, nonconformist, courageous woman. This is the image that the forms and colors of Emi Ligabue - always fascinated by everyday objects, to which she dedicates her artistic research - convey to the reader, thanks to a personal and original interpretation of her intense existence and her numerous projects. And this is the image that Gisella Bassanini and Giovanna Canzi tell with philological rigor and at the same time with lightness to those who are about to retrace the life of this visionary, talented, and in many ways revolutionary designer."