Revisiting the rich archives of Jean Prouvé, his daughter Catherine takes us on a stroll down memory lane.
“My father loved to balance on the back legs of his chair,” recalls Catherine Prouvé of her father, Jean. “That’s the position he took to ponder over new inventions and design solutions,” she says. “He was the only one who managed to stay perfectly still on just two legs.”
This daughter’s memory offers us a clue as to why two legs of Jean Prouvé’s best known chair, the Standard, are typically conic. Unlike the thin pin-like legs in this chair’s front, the pair in the back slim down towards the floor. Made from folded sheet metal, they are sturdy yet light-weight. But perhaps just as important is the way they lend themselves to more playful uses than just plain sitting.
Jean Prouvé is generally described as one of the greatest French designers of the 20th century. He was a prolific inventor, a passionate teacher and engineer, an architect, a hands-on workman and a visionary manufacturer. His great enthusiasm for construction was catholic in its reach, including large-scale industrial machines, the inside of photo cameras or the logics of Bach, which he couldn’t resist listening to at highest volume. He was a pilot of airplanes as well as automobiles, whose engines he could spend hours tinkering with. He liked his cars fast and his convertible tops down: “He didn’t even put the top up when it started to rain,” according to his daughter. “He made us kids believe that if he went fast enough, the rain would just shoot over our heads.”
In the first thirty years of his career in the Atelier Prouvé in Nancy, which he had founded in 1924 after having been trained as a metal smith and engineer, he worked on countless design solutions for everything from wood and sheet metal furniture to experimental buildings for schools, hospitals and offices. He also designed prefabricated refugee houses and holiday homes. His flat-packed tropical houses from this era – the Maison Tropicale – have become one of the most desired treasures of today’s high-bidding vintage architecture collectors.
It was in one of these case-study houses that Catherine and her 4 siblings grew up. “Home, like furniture, was about experimentation. We lived among ever-changing prototypes, because even if a chair had long-since entered into mass production, father kept on improving it, switching parts and changing materials.”
Family holidays were adventurous, too. “We spent one summer all together in one huge tent that father had designed for just that occasion. But at the end it probably did not pass the four-week testing, as it was never developed into a product and the next year my mother was given a camper,” she recounts. Some years earlier, the family had even tried out one of the inventor’s prefabricated refugee houses: “It must have been in early June of 1946 when a flatpack of a house was placed on a train and taken to Brittany, where mother awaited the delivery. She had left a couple of days earlier to scout an appropriate spot, where the house could be installed for the length of one summer. By autumn it was disassembled once again, sold and shipped to the new owners.”
“We were like a family of guinea pigs,” laughs Catherine Prouvé. Everything revolved around new ideas. Dinners were spent talking about new ways of constructing things. Colleagues from the factory were among the frequent houseguests. Prouvé’s atelier, which by the Second World War had become the most innovative and experimental laboratory for material research and industrial production in Europe, drew visits from luminaries like Le Corbusier and Alexander Calder, who would also join the family for dinner. “My mother had always a huge amount of food ready. She never knew how many friends would come along with my father. And sometimes there were also complete strangers, even hitchhikers, who he had given a ride to on his trips between Nancy and Paris,” she says. “It could happen that we would walk into the living room in the morning and startle a bunch of students, who had stayed for a night’s rest on the Cité armchairs.”
Such a distinctively human touch was so unusual for its time that it sometimes worked against him. “People criticized my father of being a bad businessman. True, he was not interested in accumulating personal wealth. Annual profits were first invested into new machinery, the rest was split among the workers. If investment in research and happy workers are bad for business, so be it.” Catherine, the oldest of the five Prouvé children, is especially sensitive to this kind of criticism of her father, as it reminds her of the painful period in which Jean Prouve was pushed out of the factory. By the 1950s, the atelier had grown into the major industrial player, and the new financial backer Aluminium Français adapted a more aggressive, sales-oriented strategy. The effort to bleach Prouvé’s blue-collar approach white failed. Behind an office desk, Prouve was detached from the actual design process in the factory and soon felt frustrated. In 1956 Jean Prouvé left his Atelier with the words: “I cannot work like this”. By then he had patented more than 50 inventions.
His daily routine always started early – very early – in the factory. “The mornings were a ritual. When father walked into the buzzing hall, which were filled with the sounds of cutting, punching, bending and welding machines, the workers would drop their work and rush together to see his sketches and to listen to his explanations of the day’s task. He sketched constantly,” recalls his daughter. “But these drawings were mere tools of the production and not art pieces that were preserved, signed or dated, but crumpled and thrown into the basket once the message was conveyed.”
He once said: “Build for eternity ¬and objects might become relics from the past. Build for one generation and they might last for several generations”. As Catherine Prouvé sums up: “who doesn’t like to think of a chair as somethsomething more than just a chair?”
Anniina Koivu
