Le-Corbusier

When the High Court of Punjab and Haryana opened in March 1955, every committee chair, library seat and demountable workstation inside it was a Pierre Jeanneret design — and seventy-one years later, those same teak-and-cane typologies are the second great mid-century price story after Eames. Chandigarh furniture, as the trade now calls it, was built for the civic interiors of the Capitol Complex that Le Corbusier drew between 1951 and 1965; it was declared obsolete in batches between the 1980s and the early 2000s; it was repatriated, restored, and resold by a small number of European dealers; and it has, since roughly 2007, run a parallel canon to the Cassina LC series whose 1928 Paris drawings sit at the other end of the same architects’ careers. ...

Cassina has been producing the LC series — the canonical Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret pieces — since 1965. The LC2 armchair, the LC4 chaise, the LC6 table: these are the works that defined what mid-century modernism meant when translated into commercial production. Their continued availability is, in many ways, the bedrock of Cassina’s brand. Sixty-one years of uninterrupted manufacture have turned three architects’ tubular-steel experiments of the late 1920s into the closest thing modernism has to a vernacular. ...