The trio of Le Corbusier, Perriand and Jeanneret, in 1935, together with René Herbst, designed the Maison du Jeune Homme for the Brussels Expo, where mind and body seem to inhabit a ‘duplex’: on the one hand, the studio for intellectual activity, with desk and bookcase; on the other, separated by a net from an outdoor basketball court, the exercise zone with rings dangling from the ceiling.
In those years there was a total lack of houses for single women: prim and proper society could not get beyond the ban on female independence. Only a revolutionary like Charlotte Perriand dared to put gymnastic rings in the living room of her apartment at Montmartre, a masculine symbol of autonomy and force. But the custom of the age, instead, called for a feminine presence only in homes for married couples. In haute-bourgeois interiors the corner set aside for the woman was not so much the kitchen – a place for servants – as that of the ‘toilette,’ where the ‘missus’ spent time on care of the body, seen in terms of beauty treatments.