Jean Prouve's House

Finding somewhere to live for the family, sheltering them in their own detached house, Jean Prouvé made this old dream of all the French come true in 1954 for his wife and children. Jean Prouvé was born in 1901. A self-taught engineer, an architect without a diploma, Le Corbusier said of him, he is the archetypal builder. He started as a manual worker. In the 20s, he was an apprentice to a wrought iron craftsman. Fascinated by innovation, he soon founded his own workshop, making furniture out of sheet metal or special metallic parts for buildings designed by avant-garde architects. By the end of the Second World War, the workshop had become a factory. With his works team, Prouvé designed prototypes for the mass production of prefabricated detached houses. These factory-made houses could be built by two or three people in a single day and were supposed to be an answer to the pressing housing crisis the whole country was undergoing after the Second World War. But none of these prototypes resulted in positive orders. The France of stone and concrete found them too modern, too simple, and dismissed them with disdain as machines for living in. In 1952, a manufacturer of aluminium, an innovative material that Prouvé was using more and more, invested in the factory. Prouvé very soon found himself put out of the way. In 1953, he sent one of his daughters to photograph the workshops at Maxeville in the suburbs of Nancy for the last time. These pictures are all that remained to him of the works he had created before the new shareholder closed the door on him. In losing Maxeville, I lost everything. All I saved from the disaster was my hands, a mind in shock, no financial means, and a big family to care for. To top it all, it was during this time that I had to build my house. The Prouvé family owned a parcel of land above Nancy, probably an old vineyard, on which it was supposed to be impossible to build because of the very steep slope. The house is built on a narrow terrace on the highest part of the plot. It can only be reached on foot. Prouvé admitted later that there was a youthful mistake. It was built on poor-quality soil, sandy and unstable, so the house had to be as light in weight as possible in both in its building materials and its dimensions. There is only one story. But as Madame Prouvé said, once arrived that far up, who would want to go any higher? The narrowness of the site meant building the house along the terrace. The house backs onto the slope. The front opens southwards onto a wide prospect of the city. It is programmed for the minimum needs of a family house. Bedrooms for children and parents, a bathroom, a large living room, and what Prouvé calls the technical quarters, the kitchen and the laundry. The plan is strictly linear. The bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen spaces are simply set one beside the other. All the windows are in the front, except for this little opening to light the single corridor that serves all the rooms in the house. The corridor is lined all the way by cupboards, 27 metres of storage, just what is needed for a large family, as Prouvé pointed out every time he showed visitors round. But the very framework of the house is hidden inside these cupboards. Once the work of terracing and making the land ready was completed, the house itself was built over a few weekends, as was only to be expected of a Prouvé house. The whole family worked together with the help of a few faithful friends and workmen. But having lost his factory, Prouvé had to forsake his original plan. He had to improvise, do what he could with what he had to hand. Placed directly onto the ground, metal girders are set at intervals of 2 metres to form the framework of the floor. Behind the girders, against the slope, square metal sheets made by the local locksmith are bolted on. The girders and sheets make up the skeleton of the house. A concrete slab incorporating underfloor heating was laid on the girders. There are stone walls at each end of the building to give it stability. At the rear of the house are simple wooden panels fixed to the metal angle brackets that also serve as partitions for the cupboards. A brick-built toilet block formed the final element of the masonry. The whole of the front façade is made up of prefabricated pieces that Prouvé had designed for other projects and that he managed to recover from stock at his old factory. I built the house with leftovers, he said. Things like these front panels that were originally designed for emergency accommodation to shelter refugees from war zones during the Second World War. The panels, fitted with sash windows and including metal shutters, are a metre wide. A metre is the basic module for all Prouvé's houses. He was totally against the use of the 30-centimetre module called for by building regulations at that time. One metre is more practical and easier to calculate. Nine panels, nine metres, bolted side by side through an iron rim, form the façade of the bedrooms, subdivided inside by simple wooden partitions. The economy of space is at a maximum. The children have the right to two panels, which gives them a bedroom that is 2 metres wide by 3 metres long. That is sufficient space, according to Prouvé, for a bed, a table, a chair and bookshelves. A schoolchild needs no more. The same Spartan economy rules in the parents' bedroom. Three front panels, 3 metres, a 9-metre square bedroom, the strict minimum justified by the cramped size of the plot. Metal shutters are incorporated. The bedroom doors have rounded corners and raised sills, something in the style of a railway carriage or a ship's cabin. But Prouvé found nothing odd in that. The corners are rounded because the precision of the circular cut makes it easier to manufacture the door and its frame in a single operation and from a single panel of wood. What counts here is economy in work and materials. Everything I ever made was with the intention of being immediately constructive. I never visualised or imagined what the form would be. I had no style. I never designed shapes. I constructed things that had a shape. Of all the shapes that Prouvé created, the panel with portholes covered in aluminium is no doubt the most famous. It is an innovative element, technically speaking, much more sophisticated than a wooden panel and with much higher insulation. Prouvé used it both for his prototype for a tropical house and for the astonishing meridian at the observatory in Paris. In Nancy, these panels clad the brick-built bathroom block and formed the double-leaf entrance door. They are designed on the same one-metre module. They are sandwich panels with an interior wooden structure filled with insulation material and a finely ribbed aluminium skin that takes on a patina with time but does not corrode. Fascinated by cars, planes and rockets, Prouvé had always dreamed of manufacturing houses as beautiful and rational as such cutting-edge industrial products. It is the technical considerations that dictate the shape. It is because a circular cut-out can be much more precisely adjusted than a right-angle cut-out that Prouvé chose to make the opening's porthole shaped. But the way that the view through the portholes constantly splits and reassembles the countryside into different landscapes is enough to send the house into another dimension. In the linear rule of the house, the living room provides the only exception. After the monastic discipline of the bedrooms, the living room is the village square according to Prouvé's expression, a large space into which the whole family can invite friends and visitors. The spatial aspect is emphasised by the large glass wall that gives the feeling of being almost part of the garden and the particular rhythm of the glass panels mounted in aluminium frames. The 1-metre module gives way here to a 1.60-centimetre spacing between the uprights. The glass wall is on the same scale as the industrial or institutional buildings for which they had originally been designed. The same industrial scale applies to the large glass and steel door of the living room, a door the size of a wall, that makes it possible to open up to the outside like a workshop door. The living room is an exception. In parenthesis, Prouvé shuts it off with a simple wooden wall that separates the living room from the kitchen. There he picks up the 1-metre module again, freely associating a panel with a porthole because this is a technical area and a shuttered panel for ventilation and view. It is a house of odds and ends to give it a heterogeneous aspect. That is not important. It's been a bit thrown together, but all the different elements were fixed together without any problem because they were all part of an integrated production plan. I just knew how to make a few variations, in exactly the same way as Bach wrote variations on certain themes. Since the 20s, Prouvé had always designed furniture for mass production, chairs, armchairs or tables all based on the same principles of simplicity and economy. According to him, there is no difference between making a piece of furniture or building a house. The structure of this table, called a compass table, is based on the same concept as the frame-supported house that Prouvé perfected for the refugees at the end of the war and in which a folded sheet metal frame held up the sole ridge beam. It is a house without a roof truss that four workmen can put up in a single day without the need of scaffolding. One of these houses, that Prouvé used as his office at the Maxeville factory, was dismantled in the 60s and put up on the bottom of the land outside his house in Nancy. But at the time he started to build his family home, Prouvé's thoughts were running in another direction. In 1952, he designed the rooving for the workshops of a large printing press in Tours. It was made from one-piece aluminium elements that were prefabricated in the Maxeville factory. Prouvé had the idea of using these aluminium shells to make houses. The principle consisted of raising the rear of the shell by a wall. Prouvé dreamed up a great variety of ideas and quite naturally thought of using this shell structure for his own house. The first models were made while he still had his factory. When he lost the factory, that was impossible. He had to find a new solution that took his lack of means into account. Salvation came with a new product that then appeared on the market. Large laminated wooden panels that were at once supple and rigid. The panels are exactly 1 m wide, which was very convenient and were available in lengths up to 13 m. This is the material usually used in the construction of silos with which Prouvé improvised the roof of his house. In the narrowest part of the house, above the bedrooms and bathroom, the panels are laid on the back framework and the front wall. Over the living room, the 13 m long panels are fixed in the middle to an intermediary frame and raised at the front by the bay window wall. It is a large metal girder that came from where nobody quite knows that fulfils the role of the intermediary support so that Prouvé could benefit from the flexibility of the wood to give this very particular movement that opens up the house still further outwards. This curve was not designed in. It was the result of observation, because you can't imagine, if you don't handle it, that a wooden panel could be that supple. You don't find that sort of thing happening when you're at the drawing board. There is nothing so depressing as a drawing board and a blank piece of paper when you have to try to design a building. You draw on it, you tear it up, throw it away and start all over again. On site you don't tear things up or destroy them, you build them. Prouvé needed a building site, the constant back and forth between thinking and practice. In that way, when he built his own house in a hurry during the summer of 1954, he found once again on a small scale what he had just lost in losing his factory. A way of improvising, to dream whilst in contact with reality, a domestic architecture that would be moving and honest, simple and rather magic. But in the answer to the housing crisis in the years after the war there was no place for improvisation and dreaming. In preference to Prouvé's light and dynamic houses, there was a different vision of industrialised dwellings. The large high-rise schemes, heavy, ordinary and costly, but with the advantage of providing a quick response to the enormous demand. One of the ironies of history is that a most daunting example of these estates was built in Nancy, just above Jean Prouvé's little house. Dispossessed of his factory, but at the same time relieved of the worries of the head of a company, Jean Prouvé had more freedom to take up the struggle for, as he put it, architecture in the right place. Both his works and his teaching at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers marked generations of architects, the generation with which he worked and those who followed after. I am a workman who just did my job. I wanted to build with the most modern materials that I could find at the time, when I was making things. That's what interested me. Every period should be marked by its own time, but I think that architecturally speaking, at present, apart from a few exceptions, nothing is marking our period. I think it's heartbreaking that it should be the exception. Everything made for the greatest number is ugly, dreadful, misleading, fraudulent. That's what I think is so serious. You can't tell what things are made of. They use anything at all, as long as it looks like something they know. In the end, it's an apology for formalism, and for me, formalism is the negation of architecture.