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Just as there is more to art than pretty pictures, there is more to art books than gorgeous illustrations. When the art and architecture critics of The New York Times were asked to choose their favorite books of 2007, their selections included a collection of essays on the museum in the age of globalization, two pessimistic studies of the modern city, a volume of poetry and an anthology of ugliness. But rest assured: the list still includes plenty of provocative, powerful and just plain knockout pictures, from Rembrandt's soulful noses to Martín Ramírez's visionary paintings.
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.
But Mr. Reynolds' time has come. Dozens of his hippie houses are recognized today as the ultimate in recycling — for using garbage as insulation within their walls.
All of this is told in the documentary feature film Garbage Warrior, which played at this fall's Vancouver International Film Festival. And his house designs are shown in the timely exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas at Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture, which documents architectural responses to 1970s oil crisis.
Soon after the newly minted architect moved from Ohio to the sunny southwest, Mr. Reynolds tried embedding discarded car tires in walls; the rubber proved a more efficient insulator than straw. He soon found an even better insulation material: polycarbonate water bottles. Emptied of Evian, they are laid empty and capped, in rows like wine bottles, their ends sealed in wet concrete that forms walls.
For a warm but high-altitude climate like New Mexico's, these bottle walls provide all the insulation needed. The designer then experimented with bottles filled with water that would soak up solar heat during the day, then radiate it back out during cool desert nights.
When some of his increasingly well-heeled clients objected to the use of plastic in their walls, he substituted multi-coloured glass bottles lifted from landfills. The walls glow like stained glass windows, and their reuse saves the energy that would have been expended to melt them down for recycling.