The latest story in our mid-century modern series explores how designer Charlotte Perriand stepped out of the shadow of her mentor Le Corbusier in the 1950s and created a pioneering modular storage system.
Originally developed on a small budget for even smaller rooms in two new student halls at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, the storage system featured a flat-pack wooden frame with modular compartments made of folded aluminium.
The standardised, industrially produced metal components could be lacquered in different colours and assembled in different configurations, creating storage with unprecedented adaptability.
At Steph Simon Gallery in Paris, where the public could purchase the bookcases or Bibliothèques from 1956, Perriand even sold these compartments individually, alongside other modular "hardware" like shelves, trays and sliding panels. The designer briefly lived in Japan. Photo Jacques Martin/AChP courtesy of Scheidegger & Spiess
These could be used to customise the shelving system ? and other furniture like desks and wardrobes ? to the needs of the owner.
"Although revolutionary, this concept of kit furniture adaptable by the customer did not achieve the expected success," explained the catalogue of a 2005 exhibition on the designer's work at the Centre Pompidou.
"Undoubtedly too far ahead of her time, Charlotte Perriand did not realize that the public was not yet ready for so much freedom."
It wasn't until the 1...