Cassina Paravent Ambassade Divider
PARAVENT AMBASSADE DIVIDER
PARAVENT AMBASSADE DIVIDER
Designed by Charlotte Perriand
DESIGNER
CHARLOTTE PERRIAND
Charlotte Perriand full membership of that avant-garde cultural movement which, from the first decades of the twentieth century, brought about a profound change in aesthetic values and gave birth to a truly modern sensitivity towards everyday life.
In this context, her specific contribution focuses on interior composition, conceived as creating a new way of living, still today at the heart of contemporary lifestyle. In the sphere of twentieth century furnishing history, the advent of modernity made possible the entrepreneurial audacity of this true reformer of interior design.
At the beginning of her professional career she was acclaimed by critics for her Bar under the roof, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1927 and constructed entirely in nickel-plated copper and anodized aluminium.
In the same year, when she was just twenty-four years old, she began a decade-long collaboration with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, at the famous design studios at 35, rue de Sèvres in Paris.
Her presence in the Le Corbusier studio is visible in all the furnishings designed with him and with Pierre Jeanneret: and so Charlotte Perriand becomes a cornerstone in the reformation project promoted by the architect, adding a distinct dimension of humaneness to the often cold rationalism of Le Corbusier.
In her creations she manages to animate the fundamental substance of daily life with new aesthetic values: in particular her talent and intuition in the discovery and use of new materials manifest themselves to their full extent.
The ten-year long collaboration with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, and her Japanese experience, represent periods of intense creative effervescence in the life of the artist.
During her long stay in the Far East (‘40-‘46), she reveals her artistic talent to the full, through a reinterpretation of the reality of life to echo both tradition and modernity.
By way of example, worthy of mention are the furnishings produced using traditional bamboo processing techniques, capable of enhancing the new forms already experimented using steel-tubing.
After her work as a professional, she concentrates on a series of original and balanced productions, commissioned by top-level authorities and leading companies of the calibre of Air France, and by a number of foreign organizations, authenticating the fame she had by now gained on the international scene.
The distinguishing factor of Charlotte Perriand’s personality is a sincere loyalty to the principles of humane and innovative rationalism, preserved intact in her projects, on which she worked with such passion, also in readiness for their revival in the “Cassina I Maestri” collection.
INFORMATION
FINISHES
Walnut (Amerikanischer)
TIE RODS
Aluminium
BRAND
Cassina
PRODUCT TYPE
Divider
SOLID WOOD BLOCKS
In canaletto walnut, natural oak or oak stained black.
DIMENSIONS
- Length : 221 cm
- Height : 167 cm
USE
Interior
COLLECTION
Paravent
CHARACTERISTICS
A genuine architectural composition where blocks of canaletto walnut or oak are the ideal element to embellish a design piece that epitomizes exoticism and functionality.
ARTIST’S PUZZLE
A painstaking architectural composition, an artist’s design puzzle made for the interior decor of an ambassador’s home, a piece that narrates Charlotte Perriand’s passion for Japan and its artisan heritage.
PRODUCTION YEAR, 1969
In 1969, Charlotte Perriand designed a screen for the home of the Japanese ambassador to France. This allowed her to put her passion for the Far East to work. During her travels to the region, she gained many insights into the immense local artisan heritage.
Charlotte Perriand, expert in designing furniture to meet the needs of its user, conceived the Paravent Ambassade screen to hide the door connecting the office to the salon de réception, a space that evoked a certain solemnity also because of the presence of a large sofa, over seven meters long, next to which the screen was placed.
Due to a lack of budget to construct the screen, Perriand had the brilliant idea of reusing the discarded solid rosewood left over from the production of her Tabourets which she had cut into rectangular blocks to be connected with threaded rods.
The result is an artist’s puzzle, a small architectural composition made from 313 hand-processed solid wood blocks, assembled one by one, held together by vertical tension rods and separated by anchors. A masterpiece of perseverance that, thanks to the great number of blocks, makes it possible to mold the screen into increasingly diverse shapes and articulate its movement with sinuousness like that of a micro-mesh.
