Jean Prouvé is one of the greatest French designers of the 20th century. Working as a craftsman, designer, manufacturer, architect, teacher and engineer, his career spanned over sixty years. He mainly worked with buildings and furniture. I heard about him during my first visit to the design museum and there fore looked up his work.
From his early days, Prouvé was apprenticed as an artist blacksmith, then progressed on to running a studio and then established his own factory in France, where he worked until 1953. Driven by the constant quest for innovation in process and use of materials, his bold, reduced forms were inspired by the sparse aesthetic of aircraft and automobile design. Prouvé believed in the power of design to make a better world and saw design as a moral issue.
Born in 1901, Prouvé came from an artistic home. His father, Victor Prouvé, a painter and sculptor, was a founding member of the Art Nouveau School. Prouvé designed sturdy but light-weight furniture from his earliest experiments in folded steel in the late 1920s. It became a core part of his business. By 1934 he had a commission for 800 pieces of office furniture for the headquarters of the Paris power company CPDE. This made Prouvé a serious contender in the market for mass-produced furniture. He avoided the domestic market, however one secondary school ordered 1000 items, including beds, chairs and desks. These successes led the company, in 1936, to produce a catalogue of standard models for hospitals, schools and offices. The potential for mass production inspired Prouvé to develop and patent industrial products using folded sheet metal for the construction of buildings.
The outbreak of World War II brought restrictions on the use of electricity and raw materials. Prouvé’s factory adapted, by producing a range of products responding to the crisis. His patent Pyrobal stoves could run on any fuel and he worked on emergency generators, bicycle frames and wooden furniture. Prouvé worked with wood when steel was in short supply, and by 1947 furniture accounted for a third of his business. Prouvé moved his operations to Maxéville, and by 1953, the factory had over 200 employees. With its own design studio, Prouvé could combine research, prototype development and production on one site. He not only produced houses but also set up a production line for furniture based on his own designs as well as continuously upgrading the machine-tools. Prouvé lost control of the factory when Aluminium Français, took over in 1953. The loss was a huge emotional setback for Prouvé who had called himself ‘a factory man’. Prouvé built himself a house using components salvaged from the factory. This unique house brought an end to the experimental phase in his career. From then on he stopped being a manufacturer and instead established a new business, Construction Jean Prouvé, that turned him into a designer.
It allowed him to realise some of his more elegant and technically ambitious projects, moving away from making components to designing more complex buildings. He was commissioned to design a pavilion on the banks of the river Seine, to celebrate the centenary of aluminium. He also designed an innovative spa building in Evian, and worked on housing, youth centres and schools that reflected his social values. It was also a period of creative collaborations with designers such as Charlotte Perriand.
Prouvé’s approach to design and making was systematic. Both the design process and the look of his design were of equal interest to him. He produced flow charts for the factory at Maxéville. These showed exactly how materials and elements moved from one machine to another and how one procedure followed another, from the stocking of sheet metal, rubber and neoprene sections, right up to the product’s dispatch. Tools and materials were categorised by the making process: cutting, punching, bending, plating, stamping and welding. Also his frame-by-frame photographic documentation of each experimental building project allowed him to refine the product and its construction.
The same precision was applied later to his teaching. In 1957 Prouvé was asked to give weekly lectures at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métier in Paris. Always packed to capacity, Prouvé illustrated his ideas with a succession of drawings on the blackboard and argued that the root of creativity came from the practice of theories and not academic knowledge alone. Almost a thousand pages of his lecture notes survive.
Prouvé has become a legendary figure since his death in 1984. Many of his landmark buildings are now national monuments and his furniture and architectural elements, façades and buildings are sought by collectors.
His work, however, is not so easily categorised. He designed furniture and he also made it. He also was certainly an architect, even though he never qualified.
