A Cushion For Charlotte

Charlotte Perriand first applied to work for Le Corbusier in 1927. She strode into his studio at 35 rue de Sèvres, Paris, asking him to hire her as a furniture designer. His dismissive response was: ‘Nous n’avons pas de broder coussins ici.’ (We don’t embroider cushions here).

A Cushion For Charlotte is a soft furnishing manifesto that uses the decorative arts to argue that yes, cushions too might be both architectural and radical. In passing the piece echoes the negative-positive surrealist logic of Magritte’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’.