Charlotte Perriand’s barrel refuge from 1938 that looked like a spaceship

In 1937 Charlotte Perriand was in Croatia with Pierre Jeanneret when she spotted a children’s carousel on the beach and had an intuition: there was a project she deeply cared about, and she had just understood how to improve it. Ninety years later, in 2026, anyone entering the Triennale Milano cannot fail to notice what looks like a space module landed on the mosaic floor at the entrance: a kind of aluminium barrel with portholes inviting visitors to peer inside. The Refuge Tonneau—literally, the “barrel refuge”—is a crucial node in Perriand’s relationship with the mountains, as decisive for her story as the seating pieces presented with Le Corbusier and Jeanneret in 1929 or the interiors of the Cité Radieuse. It is recounted to us by Charlotte’s daughter, Pernette Perriand, who together with Jacques Barsac has long overseen the cultural legacy of one of the great protagonists of modern design.

“She began mountaineering at 18; she was crazy about the mountains,” Pernette tells us. “At the time she even slept à la belle étoile; but she often found herself trapped by bad weather with no shelter available—up there there was nothing. Or rather, there were a few refuges, but they were built in stone or concrete. Charlotte, who was an avant-gardiste, began developing prefabricated shelters, on her own or with Pierre Jeanneret. The point was that no single piece should weigh more than 40 kilograms, so that it could be carried on people’s backs up into the mountains.”

Pernette Perriand

This led in 1937 to the Refuge Bivouac: prefabricated, lightweight, demountable, its trapezoidal section literally inspired by the shape of a shoebox.

But that was only the beginning. “At the time there were around 50,000 skiers and mountaineers in France, and the curve kept rising: shelters had to be created to keep them safe. These were prototypes, meant to be multiplied into 20, 30, 40 units scattered across the peaks,” says Barsac. “Charlotte was an engagée woman; she wanted to share her love of the mountains with as many people as possible,” adds Pernette, “because compared to the vastness of the French and Swiss Alps, 50,000 was a small number. It was a political stance: she fought for social innovation and wanted to devote her expertise to prefabrication and leisure architecture, responding to a social and sporting need.”

The Refuge Bivouac could host only six people, and its angular form needed to be improved in its response to wind. This is where the beach carousel, the intuition, and in 1938 the development of a new concept came in, together with Pierre Jeanneret and engineer André Tournon. The Refuge Tonneau was based on a simple metal structure: an umbrella of twelve segments suspended from a central pole, its floor plan dimensioned through a meticulous study of bunk arrangements—the maximum number of beds that could be inscribed within a circle. It could accommodate up to 18 people. The “barrel” was tall: bunks were arranged on the upper level; on the entrance level there was a minimal space for sitting and warming up, with the possibility of adding two extra beds if needed. Everything was wrapped in prefabricated sandwich panels made of aluminium and insulation, some solid, others punctured with portholes. The form was a dodecagonal prism, very close to a cylinder: wind was no longer a problem.

The Refuge Tonneau was never built—at least not at the time. War broke out and everything came to a halt. Yet the foundations of Perriand’s experimental method had been laid, and from the post-war period onward they would fully unfold. Charlotte became one of the leading voices of a truly modern approach to designing life in the mountains. “She used to say that before the war there was experimentation, and after the war application,” Pernette confirms. “Think of Le Corbusier in Marseille, Chandigarh, everywhere: they were applications of pre-war experiments. For Charlotte it was the same.”

We see this in her true “work of a lifetime,” developed over two decades in the French Alps: Les Arcs. Three separate winter sports resorts (Arc 1600, Arc 1800, Arc 2000), for which she oversaw urban planning, architecture and interiors, amounting to around 30,000 beds. Themes initiated before the war reappeared: linear buildings with green roofs embedded into the contours of the slopes, and the idea of prefabricating entire portions of domestic space.

Pernette Perriand

“In 1937 she also presented her first prefabricated bathroom at the International Exposition,” Perriand recalls, “and from 1968 she built them in new materials, no longer aluminium but polyester. At Les Arcs they arrived by truck: we installed eight a day inside the concrete structures of the apartments. And people rarely realise the difficulty she faced in achieving architecture and design that were so economical. For Les Arcs she also designed the furniture: interesting pieces, not expensive, suited to the economic conditions of the time and still in use 50 years later.”

Here lie the foundations of the “Perriand method”: thinking across scales, through hybrid objects between architecture and design like the Refuge Tonneau; grounding every project in programme, reality, a concrete necessity, and a budget. If we look at an icon such as the Fauteuil à dossier basculant, Barsac suggests that its structure and stretched leather are like looking at the Refuge Bivouac: the same design process. Pernette is not entirely convinced. For her, “Charlotte’s work begins first with a need, and then with a price. That’s what she taught me: to consider from the outset what I can do within a precise budget.” And above all with the programme: “if you start from the wrong programme and don’t change it, you cannot achieve good results.”

The Refuge Tonneau would eventually be built: first in “apocryphal” form, with its technical solutions applied in the Concordia station in Antarctica (2002) and the Mars Society Desert Research Station (2011); and finally constructed by Cassina as Perriand and Jeanneret had imagined it, in 2012. In 2026 it makes an Olympic stop at Triennale Milano with the exhibition White Out by Konstantin Grcic and Marco Sammicheli. In recent years Barsac and Pernette Perriand have brought many of Charlotte’s unpublished projects to life: from the Maison au bord de l’eau, produced with Louis Vuitton, to the furnishings presented by Saint Laurent at Milan Design Week 2025, also built by Cassina.

A time that exceeds that of a single life—even one as long as Charlotte’s—just as the time of design exceeded her hours in the studio. “She worked with only one person; she produced an enormous amount of research and sketches, which she then handed over to refine this or that idea. But when she came home, at lunchtime, in the evening, she kept thinking, kept working. She was extremely demanding. And yes, she always had the final word.”