Jean Prouvé
A Testimony to IngenuitY
“Jean Prouvé represents in a singularly eloquent manner, the type of the ‘constructor’ – a social grade – not yet accepted by law but actively wanted by the era in which we live. I mean by this that Jean Prouvé is, indissolubly, architect and engineer. Or rather, architect and constructor, for everything he touches and conceives immediately assumes an elegant plastic form while offering brilliant solutions with regard to strength and manufacture” - Le Corbusier
“Prouvémania” — as the New York Times called the demand for Jean Prouvé (1901-1984) — peaked in 2014 when Artcurial sold a table by the French designer (known as Table Trapèze from 1956) for €1,241,300 doubling its upper presale estimate of €600,000. It sold to a North American collector. Table Trapèze, also known as Table Centrale was designed by Prouvé for the university campus in Anthony, in the suburbs of Paris, for which he conceived all the furniture. Widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and idealistic designers of the early modernist movement, Prouvé championed mass-produced pieces, introducing the “Machine Age” and industrial engineered modern design aesthetic to the steel and aluminum architecture he created. Making everything from lighting, to letter openers, to pre-fab buildings, Prouvé believed design was a moral issue, proclaiming “I’m not an architect; I’m not an engineer – I’m a factory man”. The French designer played a pivotal role in the development of cutting-edge technology and modular systems for mass production in the post-war modernist period. He believed in design as a vehicle for movement, developing a philosophy based around functionality and rational fabrication, stating that “in their construction there is no difference between a piece of furniture and a house.” As French architect Joseph Belmont stated, “he was one of the great pioneers of our time, the inventor of a new industrial architecture, a visionary little understood in France, but known everywhere abroad” (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1989). With a carer spanning more than sixty years, Prouvé was at once artist, designer, crafsman, architect and engineer; but he might never have become so had it not been for his family’s crippling bankruptcy, which forced him to abandon his studies at 15 and become a metalworker’s apprentice.
Born in Paris, France, the second of seven children of the artist Victor Prouvé and the pianist Marie Duhamel, Prouvé grew up in Nancy, surrounded by the ideals and energy of “l'École de Nancy”, an alliance of local artists and industrialists to which his father belonged. Its goals were to make art readily accessible, to forge a democratic alliance between art and industry, and to articulate a link between art and social consciousness. Prouvé founded his own workshop in 1924, at the age of 23, at first making metal joinery and doors, and then furniture, like his “Chaise inclinable” (1924). Aware of the limitations of ornamental and wrought-iron work and determined to be a man of his time, Prouvé began experimenting with materials like steel and aluminum, “bent, pressed, compressed than welded” (unlike his his Bauhaus contemporaries who preferred bent steel tubes) and rapidly became wholly utilitarian. With a preference for function over aesthetics, he concentrated instead on the essence of materials, connections and production. In 1930 he helped establish the Union des Artistes Modernes, a group of prominent architects and designers, whose manifesto read, “We like logic, balance and purity” (Members of U.A.M. included French pioneers Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand). Although Prouvé shaped his public image around the idea that he was not married to a specific aesthetic, the principles of l'École de Nancy were certainly a powerful influence on his body of work. “I was raised," Prouvé said, “in a world of artists and scholars, a world which nourished my mind.” In 1931 he established the Atelier Jean Prouvé, eschewing the era’s elaborately crafted Art Deco forms in favour of a more rational, stripped back aesthetic. Socialist in outlook, Prouvé operated a flat management and social hierarchy, referring to his workers as “compagnons”, a French term that describes both a friend and craftsman.
Jean Prouvé, Wardrobe, model no. AP 11 Oak, painted steel, painted aluminum (c. 1945) Photograph: ©Phillips
Jean Prouvé, 'Antony' chair, model no. 356 , Beech-veneered plywood, painted steel, aluminium (c. 1954) Photograph: ©Phillips
Prouvé produced light-weight metal furniture of his own design, as well as collaborating with other design luminaries of the period, such as Robert Mallet-Stevens, Pierre Jeanneret (Le Corbusier's cousin and collaborator), and Charlotte Perriand. His shelving units for the dormitories at the Cite internationale universitaire de Paris, designed with Perriand and the artist Sonia Delaunay in 1952, are perhaps the best-known examples of his collaborative work. As Perriand said in 1983, “Jean Prouvé is what we can call a unique example of the result of [an] education that combines craftsmanship with thinking without any undue emphasis on either of them” (C. Perriand quoted in ‘Jean Prouvé: Les Maisons Tropicales’ 2006). Free of all artifice, Prouvé’s designs were notable for their revolutionary approach to material, drawing upon industrial technology without compromising on aesthetic. Classic pieces include works in lightweight, folded sheet metal — such as a 1950s aluminium wardrobe originally created for hospitals and sanatoriums, balancing the needs of hygiene, strength and security with a sleek, modern style. Prouvé strove for the most constructionally and materially efficient designs; his “standard” chair (1934) designed for the University of Nancy is one of his best-known pieces, displaying his understanding of engineering and structure. The back legs, which support the sitter’s body, are made of voluminous hollow sections, resembling an aircraft wing, and the front legs, which bear the lighter load, are made from a lightweight tubular piping. Entirely self-taught, to Prouvé there was "no difference between the structure of a building and the structure of a table," as his grandson Serge Drouin explained to Dwell in 2014 (S. Drouin quoted in ‘Progressive Prefabs of Jean Prouvé’ 16 September 2014).
During the Liberation, French Minister for Reconstruction Raoul Dautry commissioned Jean Prouvé’s workshop to fabricate model houses.
By the 1930s, his workshop was manufacturing furniture and architectural components for schools, factories and other buildings. During the second world war, Prouvé developed a barrack unit for the French army that could be assembled in three hours. In his forties, and not of fighting age, Prouvé joined the French Resistance (using the code name “locksmith”), being appointed as provisional mayor of Nancy in 1944. During the Liberation Raoul Dautr, General Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Reconstruction and Urban Development, commissioned Prouvé’s workshop to fabricate model houses for the victims of Lorraine and Franche-Comté whose homes had been destroyed by bombing. The “6 x 9” Demountable House (named for its 6 x 9 metre module (388 sq ft), mandated by the Ministry of Reconstruction and Town Planning, later increased in size to 6 x 9 meters (581 sq ft)) could be assembled and dismantled quickly using prefabricated elements. The structure, based on his patented axial portal frame, was exceptional simple, designed to be easily transportable and habitable upon assembly; meaning families did not have to move while construction took place. Produced with wood and metal prefabricated components, the roof roof was made of bitumen-coated building paper. At a time when cheap, speedily built housing was needed all over the world, Prouvé was recognized as a leader in the field.
“Architect? Engineer? Why raise the question, why debate it? The important thing is to build … It immediately makes one realise that the architect has to be an engineer otherwise there is no dependable idea” - Jean Prouvé
Prouvé continued his wartime research into speedily assembled structures by making emergency housing for refugees and the homeless from modular wooden panels, as metal was still scarce. In 1947, after opening his Maxéville factory, he set about fulfilling his ambitious plan to alter the building process from a craft-based practice to that of a mechanized industry. Undertaking extensive architectural research on the uses of aluminum, he developed the prefabricated refugee houses of 1945, followed by the Maisons Tropicales “flat-pack” aluminium houses for Niger and the Republic of Congo, between 1949 and 1951. Prouvé designed and manufactured three prototype Maisons Tropicales, designed to address the shortage of housing and civic buildings in France’s African colonies. For ease of transport all the parts were flat, lightweight and could be neatly packed into a cargo plane. Ultimately, although designed for mass production, only three Maison Tropicales were ever built and shipped; partly as a result of the time and expense involved in their production, but also because their unconventional design did not appeal to the more conservative tastes of expatriate French bureaucrats (One of the three prototypes that had been “rescued” from the “jungle” by art dealer Eric Touchaleaume of Galerie 54, Paris was sold in June 2007 at Christie‘s New York to hotelier André Balazs for almost five million dollars).
Jean Prouvé’s “6 x 9” Demountable House (1944), metal and wood, named for its 6m by 6m module Photograph: ©Phillips
After Maxéville Prouvé started “Constructions Jean Prouvé” whose major works were a cafe in Evian, a pavilion for the centennial of aluminum and the Abbey Pierre house. Shortly after the delivery of the last two Maison Tropicales to Brazzaville, Congo in 1951, tension between Prouvé and the now majority shareholder Aluminium Français increased, with its demanding changes in both the design and manufacturing processes that were opposed to the very fundamentals on which the company had been founded. In 1952, in his early 50’s, Prouvé, no longer able to compromise, stepped down. He often described this period as “the year he died” and yet, perhaps, in hindsight, it saved his reputation.
Although he claimed that, “evolution can only proceed on the strength of verification, its sole source”, in the ensuing decades, he would continue to create and inspire, serving as a consulting engineer on a number of important architectural projects in Paris. He left his mark on architectural history once again in 1971, when he played a major role in selecting the design of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers for the Centre Pompidou as chairman of the competition jury. Rogers recognized Prouvé as a major influence and called him “a pioneer in linking the process of construction to the language of modern architecture.” Prouvé designed to improve the lives of the masses, and the significance of his humanist concerns and avant-garde spirit has lost none of its relevance; but perhaps there is something slightly perverse about his furniture being auctioned off as collectors pieces. As he said: “If people understand, there’s no need to explain. If they don’t, there’s no use explaining.”