Complete kitchen by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier is widely regarded as one of modernism’s most influential architects and theorists. He put his radical ideas about architecture and the new, modern world into practice in everything from private villas to large apartment blocks and utopian plans for entire cities. Röhsska Museum is proud to present a complete kitchen from Le Corbusier’s most famous building, Unité d’Habitation, built in Marseille 1947–1952. The years after WWII were difficult years on the continent, as there was a huge need for housing. Unité d’Habitation was a radical architectonic and social project that originated in Le Corbusier’s visionary city planning from the 1920s. It consisted of huge apartment blocks with capacity for 1,600 residents and, in principle, each one would functional as a self-sufficient town. Initially, Le Corbusier rarely designed the interior design of his buildings, instead using standard furnishing from Thonet or American office furniture.

At the end of the 1920s, Charlotte Perriand was employed by Le Corbusier’s architects’ office. She was solely responsible for the office’s interior designs for a decade. When Unité d’Habitation was built in Marseille, the task of designing the standard kitchen went to Charlotte Perriand, even though she had left the firm several years previously. To Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, a home was a machine for living in. Inspiration came from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time studies of industrial workers In the US at the end of the 19th century. In a modern kitchen, everything should be easily available and close by, so that work could be done as rationally as possible and it would also be a pleasant place to be.