Charlotte Perriand is one of the foremost figures in twentieth-century interior design. Together with her contemporaries and collaborators Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier, she created many pieces of furniture we now consider classics, including the instantly recognizable LC4 chaise. Her pioneering work with metal was particularly instrumental in paving the way for the machine-age aesthetic popular throughout the 1920s and ’30s.

The first volume in a planned four-part series, this lavishly book looks at Perriand’s early life: her education, her work in photography, her early interest in pre-fab residential architecture, and her years spent working with Le Corbusier at his studio on the Rue de Sèvres in Paris. While most are familiar with Perriand’s game-changing design work, the book also documents her less widely known involvement with leftist groups and her desire for social change that drove her to create affordable and appealing furniture for the masses. Influenced by this and her participation in the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, Perriand turned in the 1930s to more inexpensive natural materials like cane and wood.

The second volume in a planned four-part series, this lavish book covers the years between 1940 and 1955. Beginning in the 1940s, Perriand traveled extensively in Japan by invitation of the Japanese government with whom she worked as an advisor to modernize the country’s design. During this period, she took many photographs documenting traditional Japanese culture, many of which are published here for the first time. From 1952 to 1955, a fruitful collaboration with the Ateliers Jean Prouvé provided for the first time the technical means for Perriand to mass-produce her designs while also further improving Prouvé’s own work both aesthetically and practically. A number of emblematic masterpieces came about as a result of this collaboration, including the Tunisian and Mexican dormitories at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris.

The third volume in a planned four-part series, this lavish book covers the years between 1956 and 1968. During this period, Perriand established a relationship with the Galerie Steph Simon, which exhibited and published some of her most iconic work, as well as that of renowned contemporaries Serge Mouille, Georges Jouve, and Jean Prouvé. Perriand also completed several high-profile projects throughout the 1960s, most of which are published here for the first time, including comprehensive branding and designs for Air France’s offices around the world and the renovation of the Palais des Nations, where many of her designs for furniture and the assembly halls she decorated remain in use and relatively unchanged to this day. The new volume also documents comprehensively her close, yet little-known, links to Brazil.

The concluding fourth volume of this definitive monograph on Charlotte Perriand covers the last three decades of her long career. At its core is the Les Arcs ski resort in the French Alps, where Perriand played a key role in the project development. A pioneer of bioclimatic architecture, she oversaw the architectural and urban design of Arc 1600 and Arc 1800 and created the interiors and entire outfitting down to cutlery and china for the more than 4,500 apartments. Les Arcs, an extraordinary undertaking both in sheer size and the extent of Perriand’s contribution, marks the culmination of her research on alpine housing in unison with nature. The book also features a number of projects—housing and art spaces—from Paris to Tokyo, in which she aimed once more to push the borders of a specific modern, cultivated way of living. It also offers a comprehensive appraisal of seven decades’ work that manifests the creative force and vision of this extraordinary woman, one of the most eminent protagonists of modern architecture and design.