Charlotte Perriand and the Japanese line

Charlotte Perriand designed some of the defining furniture of European modernism — and then, invited to advise Japan in 1940, she let that work be taken apart and rebuilt by hand.

Her tubular-steel chaise longue was rewoven in bamboo. Modernism passed through a Japanese workshop and came back transformed.

What she found there — economy of means, respect for material, the empty space as a positive element — runs in the opposite direction to Ando's concrete, yet arrives at the same place. Perriand is the hinge of this whole project: proof that the Asia–Europe conversation was always a two-way street.