As an artisan, self-taught engineer and builder in the French city of Nancy, Jean Prouvé (1901-1984) was a hands-on innovator, utilizing sheet metal for furniture and buildings. Through all of these activities his consistent goal was to achieve maximum utility with a minimum of materials at the lowest possible cost.
His furniture was produced in quantity for schools and universities and the revenue subsidized his experiments in prefabrication. Prototypes of his Tropical House were shipped to French colonies in West Africa and flown back to France fifty years later to be restored and widely exhibited.
Thanks largely to the efforts of French gallerist Patrick Seguin, Prouvé has achieved posthumous fame—even cult status—and as a result the demand for original pieces of furniture from Ateliers Prouvé has stimulated a lively trade in fakes and re-issues.
Over the years I’ve repeatedly combed the flea markets of Paris in search of lost treasures. The most monumental of these finds was Jean Prouvé’s Room 10, École de Dieulouard, a schoolroom disassembled and brought to the Gustav Eiffel-designed sawtooth roofed warehouses at Clignancourt. Amid the pile-up of generic furniture I spotted an unmistakable pale yellow gleam coming from a stack of sheet-steel beams. Obscured and disheveled as these fragments were, their authenticity jumped out at me. This was one of the many prefabricated structures Prouvé had created over the years; a domestic or commercial version of the Tropical Houses. The elements were shipped to the US, where they were restored and re-assembled with the assistance of architect Alain Baneel.
Prouvé said “there is no difference between the design of a piece of furniture and that of a house.” Whether considered as scaled-up case work, cabinetry for living, or micro-architecture, his nomadic architecture is a source of inspiration to every architect and designer who strives for economy infused with poetry. These structures are models of cantilevering, balance, structural strength, and weight distribution, with many logical intricacies to the assembly.
Gaby and I were honored to donate Jean Prouvé’s Room 10, École de Dieulouard to LACMA. The design and engineering behind these incredible moving buildings is critical to reassess in a contemporary context and the structures must be resurrected and stabilized for use in the 21st Century.
– M.B.
