This is not design as feckless consumerist novelty. This is design as lightweight sheet metal and welding. Catenaries, stampings, pressings. And more welding. It's not highfalutin' theory, it's horny-handed practice. It's Jean Prouvé at The Design Museum: the first exhibition of this singular individual with a line so hard it makes Le Corbusier appear an effeminate dilettante. This is what industrial design was meant to be: tough and uncompromising.

There is a marvellous photograph of Prouvé and his family on holiday in the Fifties. They are all on board a rugged American jeep, beaming as if demented with pleasure. Strapped to the sides of the four-wheel-drive, a forest of metal tent poles. Working in metal and designing light, portable structures or rational furniture was Prouvé's lifelong vocation, as inflexible as his material. He liked to be photographed not only with cars but also with lathes and, naturally, welding tools.

Never mind that there is a nagging question about the links between Prouvé's version of Modernism and the energetically exported cultural colonialism that got the French into so much trouble in the twilight of their imperium, at home and abroad Prouvé furnished the institutions of state. In 1931 the Societe des Ateliers Jean Prouvé made, for example, the furniture for the University of Nancy. In 1939 he designed portable barracks for the French army. Readers of Tintin in Tibet (1960) will be familiar with Prouvé's 'Visiteur' chair (1948). In 1967 he was credited as 'ingenieur' on de Mailly's and Depusse's Tour Nobel at La Defense, France's first commercial high rise: he designed its ambitious metal curtain wall. In 1971 Prouvé was on the jury that chose Richard Rogers' metal design for the Centre Pompidou.

- bill 12-11-2007 4:20 pm




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