Charlotte Perriand. An Architect in the Mountains.

IntroductIon

“I Love the Mountains”

buIldIng on mountaIns In the 1930s

L’Hôtel de haute montagne, 1935

High-Altitude Refuge Chalet, 1936–37

Bivouac Refuge, 1936–37

Mountain Chalet Hotel, 1937–38

The Tonneau Refuge, 1938

Saint-Nicolas-de-Véroce, 1938

A Hotel in Méribel, 1939

stIrrIngs of the WhIte gold Industry

The Creation of the Méribel Resort, 1946–48

Val-d’Isère Sports, Valsport Robert Killy, 1948–49

The Méribel Chalet, 1960–61

The Belleville Valley Competition, 1962

Becoming Aware of Our Responsabilities, 1966

Building in the mountains for the greatest number

les arcs, charlotte PerrIand’s magnum oPus

Birth of a City for Leisure Activities, 1960–67

Charlotte Perriand to the Rescue

The New Urban Development Plan for Arc 1600 Teamwork

Sources, Echoes, Reminiscences

The Trois Arcs Residence and Hotel, 1967–68

The Cascade Residence, 1967–69

La Coupole, 1968

The Heart of the Resort, 1968–72

The Cachette Residence, 1969–70

The Versant Sud Ensemble, 1969–75

arc 1800

Another Site, Another Time: Building on an Industrial Scale

The Urban Design of Arc 1800

The Hôtel du Golf, 1970–74

The Bellecôte Residence, 1973–74

The Miravidi Residence, 1973–75

The Belles Challes Residence, 1973–75

The Lauzières Residence, 1973–176

The Shopping Street, 1973–75

The Pierra Menta Residence, 1974–79

The Nova Residence, 1976–81

Les Villards Village, 1977–81

Project for Le Chantel Haut, 1979–81

The “Charlotte Perriand Chalets” of Charmettoger, 1984–89

arc 2000

A Sublime Location

fIttIngs for les arcs

Charlotte Perriand’s Furniture

The Arc Mobilier Selection

The End of the Les Arcs Venture

mIssIon In chIna

A Winter Sports Resort in Manchuria, 1983

Charlotte Perriand Méribel Chalet, 1960–61. Kitchen, fireplace, second alcove bed.

Photograph: Pascal Lemaître.

Sliding panel closing off the fireplace.

Photograph: Pascal Lemaître.

Sliding panel closing off the kitchen.

Photograph: Pascal Lemaître.

Right-hand page Fireplace with tiles by Claude Pantzer.

Photograph: Pascal Lemaître.

Preceding double page Main room of the upper floor. View of the east wall. Door to the terrace. Table with gutters, rush-back wooden chair, wooden screen radiator cover.

Photograph: Pernette Perriand-Barsac/AChP.

Becoming Aware of Our Responsibilities, 1966

In 1963, the state created an Interministerial Commission for the Development of the Mountains. Under the direction of the civil engineer Maurice Michaud, its mission was to organize and plan the development of a new type of ski resort. This was a period of state intervention, when Paris tried to program every activity throughout the country. The planning of new resorts in the mountains, including the Belleville Valley resorts, was the counterpart of the new satellite towns then being planned for big cities. To formulate its own doctrine, the commission drew up a plan that inventoried the different sites favorable to accommodating new resorts in the French mountains, classifying them according to the categories: regional, national, or international. The architect-urban planners Pradelle, Chappis, and Michel Écochard, former ministers Pierre Cotand and Eugène Claudius-Petit, and other concerned parties like Perriand were so traumatized by the anarchic development of the Côte d’Azur that had disfigured one of the most beautiful regions in France that they wanted to find a doctrine for developing the mountains in a way that respected the environment, while meeting the leisure needs of the largest number of people.

That’s the way Charlotte Perriand published a text entitled “Prendre conscience de nos responsabilités” (Becoming Aware of Our Responsibilities), featured in the special issue “Problèmes de la montagne” (Mountain Problems) of the journal Aménagement et Nature 79

“For the sake of tourism, sports, and climate, the mountains need an agricultural policy that reconciles the protection of these high-altitude sites with economic and social policy,” she wrote. “The mountains must not become abandoned land; they must remain alive throughout the year and not offer the spectacle of a resort drained of its tourists or of a wasteland. The entire domain must be considered with regard to the economic evolution of the whole country. A global study should therefore be undertaken and a few ideas shared by all the valleys defined. It remains to foresee the intrusion of 6,000 to 25,000 tourists (the average capacity of a valley), who will weigh heavily on the scale, affecting the economy and transforming the life and moral ethics of the mountain-dwellers. The tourists will also influence the development of the cities that command these valleys, transforming them with public services: a train station, bus station, hospital and emergency rooms, a post office, telephones, fuel depots, electricity, gas… plus commerce and roads….

“Must man, for his well-being, travel by car in the winter?” Perriand asked. “For long distances like Paris to the mountains, for example: road or rail? Collective or individual means of transport?” She advocated using public transportation, since the car only distanced the mountains instead of bringing them closer. “We need the mountains in all their purity: They must be protected at all costs for the good of everyone. Roads cannot have the importance we grant them. We must pull back from their maximum usefulness in the valley, at least within the towns. Two trends are asserting themselves: One stops and concentrates cars at the entrance to the town; the other gets ready to house them outdoors along the access roads.” Her experience with the Belleville resorts showed her that the state did not want the solution she favored.

“How and where will these places of leisure be brought together?” she wrote. “Certain dualities have emerged on this subject. Our first taste of it was based neither on the town nor on the valley, but on a massif and the officials who believed in the interrelationship and reciprocal development of the towns within a given massif. Example: Les Trois Vallées. Others thought of a main resort and satellites based on the idea that ‘like bees who stay near the hive, most skiers don’t like to go more than an hour from the resort.’ These considerations provide a first way of delimiting the skiable area and lead to the exclusion of distant slopes, no matter how magnificent they might be for skiing, and even if they are linked by a chain of ski lifts.80 Example: La Plagne and the future Bellevilles.

Cover of the magazine Aménagement et Nature, September 1966.

“Is it too hasty a conclusion to think that from facility to facility, from north to south, from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean, the Alps will offer one long chain of resorts that vary in terms of destination and architectural expression, but are more or less linked to one another by ski lifts and high-altitude stops? The famous crossing from Nice to Chamonix on skis in sealskins (which Perriand had done solo in the 1930s) will seem to be from another age. Too bad, and so much the better if the towns are beautiful and if the leprosy of suburbia doesn’t cover the outskirts of urbanized zones, if the resorts dotted along this chain become so many fixed points, if activities are localized in order to foster respect for the very nature of the mountains: We must think of our mission as the Alps as a whole, starting now.

“What will the towns be like?

“Should they be total resorts, gathering together all the advantages of a complete facility in a polycentric living environment, or should they be sites with multiple built-up areas and a working-class mission? Or, as some people wish, towns with an international appeal? Here, too, ideas clash without necessarily contradicting each other.

“Why do we think that suddenly a great danger is looming over the mountains? Why do we believe that our legitimate need for beauty will be flouted? The development of today seems to us too much like taking possession, if not outright colonization, as on the Côte d’Azur, where every depredation was possible. A single tower (still too small in the face of the mountains) built in two years and divided up into apartments (for short-term rentals) certainly interests

Charlotte Perriand “Prendre conscience de nos responsabilités,” Aménagement et Nature, September 1966, pp. 10–11.

developers. But it is a snowball—one tower, two towers, three towers.… If this construction of private beds is financially profitable, can we count the beds that are regularly occupied, even by rentals, and does such uncertainty allow commerce to thrive in a resort composed mostly of secondary residences?

“Cars and buildings bring us closer to the city. Yet searching for new landscapes demands that we not go back to what we have fled. By dint of conditioning and organizing our leisure time, we will no longer know where to spend it. We are working on virgin terrain. We are intellectually and legally armed. The laws of 1958 permit land control. This jurisdiction is favorable to expansion. New means of transport and the new element added by young people explain the sudden rush. Let us issue a cry of alarm. Let’s not spoil our precious heritage. We have every opportunity, but also every risk. Lost opportunities should multiply neither in the mountains nor on the plains. Questions are raised: Who is going to build in the mountains? Why? For whom? By whom? Is generalized planning desirable? How can we insert private initiative into this framework? Must we use the ‘speculation engine,’ and if so, how? Not even answering these questions will ensure that everything can be saved; hence our return to the search for a mountain doctrine and a mountain architecture.

“We are still at the same point.… In a world that is being debased in the plains as it risks being debased in the mountains, the same questions could be asked of development of all kinds.”

Perriand’s sermon on the mount would not be heard by the authorities, but only by a group of urbanists and architects who were planning the creation of a resort in Tarentaise above BourgSaint-Maurice, above all by the young developer at the head of that project: Roger Godino.

Charlotte Perriand ascending a slope with her skis on her shoulder, 1930s. Unknown photographer/AChP.

Right-hand page Grande and Petite Ciamarella, the Les Évettes glacier, ca. 1930.

Photograph: Charlotte Perriand/AChP.

LES ARCS, CHARLOTTE PERRIAND’S MAGNUM OPUS

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meters and 4 meters in height, allowing for a mezzanine no higher than 1.78 meters under the ceiling. That would exclude that space from the tax assessment, as it would be considered uninhabitable for the purposes of urban planning regulations.723 He probably got the idea from seeing Perriand’s studio, whose mezzanine 1.76 meters under the ceiling opened onto a large volume and was perfectly suitable for sleeping or as a play area for children. Godino asked her to quickly draw up a project so that he could restart construction at Les Arcs. The aim was to build small, properly furnished but affordable structures in the heart of the wooded zone of Charmettoger at the end of the Arc 1800 plateau, the last “village” still untouched by any residential construction.

Perriand, who was very busy preparing her retrospective at the Musée des Arts décoratifs at the time,724 made use of a solution that in some ways recalled the layout of the apartments of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseille, which she had worked on in the late 1940s. By positioning the duplexes back to back, she was able to recover the volume above the central corridor serving the units and to enlarge them with a mezzanine. “I had a model made of the new leisure apartment type as soon as I got back to Paris, taking into account the retreat aspect of mountain life,” Perriand explained in her memoirs. “They featured 3.96-meter-high glazing and 1.5-meter-deep terraces, opening onto the surrounding forest and its spruces, where bluetits came to frolic in winter, cavorting on the snow-laden branches. Seen from the outside, these glazed buildings resembled artists’ studios. They threaded their way through the forest, creating a synthesis of interior furnishings, architecture, and the environment, one that immediately imparted a sense of space and guaranteed visitors a pleasant stay. The human aspect had been taken into consideration. For Roger Godino, the challenge was to stick to the budget by building on the smallest possible amount of land.”725 To the floor space of 17 square meters Perriand added 20 square meters in the mezzanine, 10 square meters of which were storage space, thus increasing the total floor space of the duplex to over 35 square meters, not to mention the 5.7-square-meter terrace.

Preceding double page

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Charlotte Perriand

Mirantins residence consisting of duplexes called the “Charlotte Perriand Chalets,” 1984–87.

Prefabricated kitchen opening onto the living room. Small solid fir bar with serving hatch.

Photograph: Catherine Taillefer.

living room. Mezzanine above the entrance, bathroom, and kitchen. Solid wood openwork partition concealing the staircase.

Photograph: Pernette Perriand-Barsac/AChP.

window front, terrace, and living room.

Photograph: Nicolas Joly/ Office du tourisme Les Arcs.

“I first put in the standardized bathroom,” Perriand wrote, “then the utility shafts and the cooking area complete with a work space. I placed a coatroom opposite the cooking area, so that anoraks, ski poles, snow boots, helmets, and backpacks could be put away neatly, and located storage units nearby. I placed a larch-beam structure on top of this ensemble, some 2.1 meters from the ground, held in place by two steel girders fastened to the longitudinal walls. I covered the floor of the ensuing 1.8-meter-high space with a Tapisom carpet, so that children could sleep on futon-like mattresses or sit and play during the day. The staircase to this part of the apartment was a problem, as I didn’t have enough room to put it in the living space. I therefore followed the example of traditional artisans’ dwellings in Japan—where occupants climb up on storage chests that are specially engineered for this purpose—-creating a semi-storage-staircase and carving a well into my beam structure. For safety, I embellished the storage-staircase and children’s space with pine guardrails, so that children wouldn’t fall down into the living area when running around. Finally, I inserted a huge storage unit into the open space above the apartment’s access gallery. The second section of the apartment was devoted to the living room, which extended over the full 3.96-meter height of the duplex. It was fitted with a bar-counter, a sofa that converted into a double bed, a dining-room table, and several stools, as well as a long wall seat that ran along the whole façade, except for the space in front of the terrace door.… Life on two levels could only benefit from the harmony of an interior architecture perfectly incorporated into its environment.” 726 Presenting her project to the developer’s design office in September 1984, Perriand was careful to point out that the minimum dimensions were “extremely tight and require the concrete to be cast exactly.” 727

Knowing that this duplex did not comply with the standards, she cautioned the developer as follows: “Ask for and obtain an exemption from the usual standards as an engineering structure. In any event, the 1.78-meter-high circulation area requires the same approach. These access spaces result from the program specified.”728 The exemption would never be sought, however, if only so as not to attract the authorities’ attention. Godino instead called their bluff and tried to break the deadlock by catching the competition off-guard with a completely new concept. The duplexes were grouped together in three small residential buildings that were kept apart from each other. Called the Mirantins,729 they were almost identical to Bernard Taillefer’s style. Each one was composed of four subsections covered by a different roof, whose slope was parallel to the façade to avoid the drawbacks of the Tournavelles roofs. Each subsection was comprised of three bays across its width and rose to three or four stories high. Each story was served by an outside staircase, which looked rather like a fire escape. The idea was to exploit an absurd feature of the new taxation system that was supposed to revamp the real-estate market, but in fact obliged developers to build outdoor corridors and staircases even at over 2,000 meters in altitude, as in Val-Thorens or Arc 2000.

The duplexes faced southwest or northeast. The ones at either end of the building had an additional opening onto nature. “What pleased me most,” Perriand wrote, “was seeing a young saleswoman’s face light up with a bright smile as she exclaimed, ‘We’re selling!’ Les Arcs had come back to life. Roger Godino had won.”730

Mirantin I, which had forty-one units, was delivered at Christmas 1985; the thirty-nine apartments of Mirantin II, Le Bellachat, were delivered at Christmas the following year; and Mirantin III, La Tournette, with its thirty-one units, was ready for occupancy at Christmas 1987. They all had the same number of square meters, although their layout varied slightly depending on their position under the roof or against the gable walls, where they had an additional opening onto the mountains. Called the “Charlotte Perriand Chalets” or the “Charlotte Perriand Studios,” these low-cost duplex apartments were a great commercial success, which in turn made it possible to kickstart further real-estate development in Les Arcs.

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Charlotte Perriand, Bernard Taillefer, architecture

Charlotte Perriand, interior design and furnishings

Bernard Taillefer, André Chedal/Cogem, site architects

Mirantins I and II residences consisting of duplexes called the “Charlotte Perriand Chalets,” 1984–87.

Photograph: Catherine Taillefer.

Sensing success for the first building even before its inauguration, Godino launched a new program of 122 duplexes with 531 beds, L’Archeboc. 731 But instead of grouping these in three distinct buildings, as with the Mirantins, he decided, for urban planning and economic reasons, to bring them together in a single building. The architectonic spirit of L’Archeboc was the same as that of the Mirantins. The building was located near the base area of the village of Les Villards, which is where skiers were welcomed and where the shopping center was. It was linked to the Mirantins residence below by the walkway. The duplexes faced either the Isère Valley to the southwest or the ski slopes to the northeast, with a wooded area bordered by the Mirantins in the foreground.

To meet the international comfort standards of a time-share-type cell, 732 the duplex was enlarged by 10 centimeters in width and 16 centimeters in depth. The mezzanine was also modified so that it could be divided into two distinct spaces with the parents’ bed at the front and the children’s beds at the back. Because of these constraints, the direction of the staircase-storage unit that provided access to the mezzanine had to be reversed. The first step was now the banquette along the living-room wall—a layout which had the effect of visually enlarging the room. The standard duplex had a floor space of 18 square meters with a mezzanine of about 15 square meters and a 1.83 by 3.12-meter terrace, making a total of over 38 square meters. The distribution of the units was totally revised in February 1986 after the developer requested modifications. The standard duplex came in twenty-three different versions to allow for the variety of ceiling heights under the roofs as well as seven special layouts. 733 Construction began in June 1986. The studios of the L’Archeboc residence were delivered at Christmas 1986, and construction was finally completed in February 1987.

To meet the demand, the projects in the Charmettoger zone were built consecutively. Godino also launched the construction of a group of three more buildings, L’Aiguille Grive I, II, and III, 734 containing 390 units with 2,000 beds. These were based on clusters of duplexes of the L’Archeboc type and were to be built over a three-year period. The composition of the buildings in an arc had been imagined ten years earlier by Taillefer, Perriand, and Regairaz. 735 Perriand defined seven different duplexes with variously sized living rooms for the 154 apartments of L’Aiguille Grive I, including the nineteen apartments under the

Charlotte Perriand, Bernard Taillefer Mirantins I and II residences consisting of duplexes called the “Charlotte Perriand Chalets,” 1984–87.

Photograph: Dransard/Officie du tourisme Les Arcs.

roof. 736 She also created a new prefabricated kitchen, this time in collaboration with Pôl. To sell the program, the SMA began to advertise it with the Winter Olympics in Albertville in mind: “1988—Olympic investment —1992. Perriand’s studios on an exceptional site.” 737 Riding high on success, the developer then built Le Vogel with fifty studios, 738 Le Thuria with 108, 739 and L’Alliet with seventy-two. 740 “Regrettably,” Perriand wrote, “there were hitches with each new building. Clients always wanted more for the same price, which had repercussions for sales. The third year, parents wanted to be able to sleep upstairs with the children. That’s fair enough, but they also wanted to be separated from them. At first, a wooden screen did the trick, letting only the sound pass through. The fourth year, they asked for a washbasin. And why not the moon for the same price? In 1989, a plan came out under my name, although my recommendations had not been incorporated. I resigned. From then on, the scheme became totally distorted.” 741 She immediately wrote a long letter to the new management of the SMA to explain her departure, which she ended with a postscript: “Since I no longer have any responsibility, my name should no longer appear on the new Aiguille Grive III programs.” 742

In 1989, the law became aware of the mezzanines’ “deviation” from the authorized habitable space and initiated proceedings against Godino. “And then obviously the public authorities said to themselves: ‘They’ve gone too far, they’re screwing with us, they’ve built extra square meters.’ And boom! I was sent to trial. And I really was up against the law for this affair. My architects, obviously, were the ones responsible. But that is somewhat the developer’s role, to shoulder his responsibilities. So I went before the court, and I said to the judge: ‘I’m the one who’s responsible, not them, so if you want to fine someone, fine me.’ They were dumbfounded. They ordered me to pay a fine of 200,000 francs. The mezzanines are still there, and that saved us a fair number of programs.” 743

Charlotte Perriand

Mirantins I and II residences consisting of duplexes called the “Charlotte Perriand Chalets,” 1984–87.

Photograph: Tom Mauron–Stéphane Ghez/Cinétévé.

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Charlotte Perriand

Aiguille Grive residence, 1986–89. Duplex. Living room from the mezzanine. Free-form glulam table, metallic leg assembly with folded return.

Photograph: Pernette Perriand-Barsac/AChP.

Page 379

Living room and mezzanine from the terrace.

Photograph: Pernette Perriand-Barsac/AChP.