Description
Pre-owned, contemporary, reproduction modern black leather chaise lounge. Designed by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier and French architect Charlotte Perriand. Hand polished chrome frame rests upon a black steel base. Simply lean back to recline the chaise to varying degrees. The Le Corbusier LC4 is one of the most iconic chairs in the history of design.
About Le Corbusier:
Le Corbusier was an eloquent critic of the finely crafted, hand-made furniture, made with rare and exotic woods, inlays and coverings, presented at the 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts. Following his usual method, Le Corbusier first wrote a book with his theories of furniture, complete with memorable slogans. In his 1925 book L’Art Décoratif d’aujourd’hui, he called for furniture that used inexpensive materials and could be mass-produced. Le Corbusier described three different furniture types: type-needs, type-furniture, and human-limb objects. He defined human-limb objects as: “Extensions of our limbs and adapted to human functions that are type-needs and type-functions, therefore type-objects and type-furniture. The human-limb object is a docile servant. A good servant is discreet and self-effacing in order to leave his master free. Certainly, works of art are tools, beautiful tools. And long live the good taste manifested by choice, subtlety, proportion, and harmony”. He further declared, “Chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois”,
Frame of an LC4 chair by Le Corbusier and Perriand (1927–28) at Museum of Decorative Arts, Paris.
Le Corbusier first relied on ready-made furniture from Thonet to furnish his projects, such as his pavilion at the 1925 Exposition. In 1928, following the publication of his theories, he began experimenting with furniture design. In 1928, he inviting the architect Charlotte Perriand, to join his studio as a furniture designer. His cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, also collaborated on many of the designs. For the manufacture of his furniture, he turned to the German firm Gebrüder Thonet had begun making chairs with tubular steel, a material originally used for bicycles, in the early 1920s. Le Corbusier admired the design of Marcel Breuer and the Bauhaus, who in 1925, had begun making sleek modern tubular club chairs. Mies van der Rohe had begun making his own version in a sculptural curved form with a cane seat in 1927.
The first results of the collaboration between Le Corbusier and Perriand were three types of chairs made with chrome-plated tubular steel frames; The LC4, Chaise Longue, (1927–28), with a covering of cowhide, which gave it a touch of exoticism; the Fauteuil Grand Confort (LC3) (1928–29), a club chair with a tubular frame which resembled the comfortable Art Deco club chairs that became popular in the 1920s; and the Fauteuil à dossier basculant (LC4) (1928–29), a low seat suspended in a tubular steel frame, also with a cowhide upholstery. These chairs were designed specifically for two of his projects, the Maison la Roche in Paris and a pavilion for Barbara and Henry Church. All three clearly showed the influence of Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. The line of furniture was expanded with additional designs for Le Corbusier’s 1929 Salon d’Automne installation, ‘Equipment for the Home’. Despite the intention of Le Corbusier that his furniture should be inexpensive and mass-produced his pieces were originally costly to make and were not mass-produced until many years later, when he was famous.
