Grand Confort Armchair

The Grand Confort Armchair (LC 3), also known as Fauteuil grand confort, was designed in 1928. The chair is one of three iconic chairs which were the result of the collaboration between the architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965), the architect and designer Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) and the architect Pierre Jeanneret (1896-1967). The chair is made of a tubular steel frame that holds five bulging leather cushions together. The other two chairs were Fauteuil à dossier basculant and Chaise lounge basculante which represents Le Corbusier’s original idea of creating different chairs for different functions.

It was after Le Corbusier saw the tubular-steel furniture of contemporary German architects, Mart Stam, Mies van Der Rohe and Marcel Breuer at the Weissenhoff Siedlung-exhibition in Stuttgart, 1927 that Le Corbusier returned to Paris inspired to create his own versions of tubular steel furniture. To support this quest for his own personal contribution to steel-tube furniture Le Corbusier hired Charlotte Perriand as a design specialist in 1927-29. Through the use of tubular steel, the team developed new versions of existing types of furniture. The Fauteuil grand confort could be seen as a reinterpreted version of the classical club armchair that was turned inside out, which exposed its construction which was not handmade but visibly machine made. It brought a classic design into line with the new machine aesthetics. [1] This was an aspect that also corresponded with Le Corbusier’s vision that was that a chair should be a “machine-for-sitting-in”. [2]It was a design that would complement and correspond to the modernist architecture of the era that incorporated innovative materials like steel, concrete and glass, to create spaces that were spacious and often planned because of the possibilities that the materials and techniques gave.

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