Jean Prouvé’s Prefab Buildings
As timing would have it, we somehow escaped the incendiary maelstrom that descended on Northern California’s Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties in the early hours of October 9, a week to the day after our departure. Wildfires would eventually destroy over 7,000 structures, kill many dozens of people, and indiscriminately render tens of thousands of residents homeless and possessionless. Throughout our trip’s second and third weeks we remained in continual contact with friends and family a continent away. The testimonies were terrifying and the tensions palpable, even over the phone. To our great fortune, our home was spared and the many months of preparation to pack up and leave (due almost entirely to Quincey’s credit) has opened our doors to a family with three school-aged children not as lucky as we were.
Meanwhile, here we were, transversing the French countryside, visiting the homes of family friends and trying to linger in places long enough to get at least a novice’s feel for a place. France is truly an amazing and impressive country, with ever changing topography and a sense of design and aesthetics and history that is often delightful and at times overwhelming. Ancient meets medieval meets modern in visual feasts and a sense of the commons that rival the ever-present open air markets and unique cuisine and delicious wines. Not that it’s all perfect; but this is another story.
I am often surprised at the circularity of life’s journeys. Nearly twenty years ago, my good friend Roberto Carra and I spent a great deal of time researching the emerging “alternative materials” design scene. We wrote books about recycled, non-wood, “sustainably harvested,” and locally adapted design solutions for paper, buildings, and packaging. This was around the time that Paul Hawken was writing about “The Ecology of Commerce” and Virginia architect William McDonnough was trying to trademark basic ecological concepts like “Cradle-to-Cradle” design and production methods. Ours was a more documentary approach, involving years of travel and painstaking synthesis of technical research around solutions to an increasingly overburdened world. Looking back, I can say we gave those books everything we had; and it was a true honor to work with a photographer and graphic artist of Roberto’s nearly unparalleled mastery during my formative years. We quickly accepted that concepts like sustainability and socially equitable design were (and will continue to be) more aspirational guideposts than economically “scalable” alternatives, often demanding great sacrifice among visionaries and early adopters who truly raise the bar on production standards.
And so it was a bit of a flashback to find myself in Arles, a beautiful ancient city on the western periphery of Provence where the Romans promoted gladiator spectacles and Vincent van Gogh spent a year in a sanitarium after he had split with the painter Gaughin and lopped off one of his ears. Somehow we landed in a hotel connected to the Luma Foundation, an intriguing and well-funded Switzerland-based organization that supports the development of alternative design and local materials, from salt crystals to agricultural residues to potato starch and algae. The Luma Foundation is also in the process of creating a sprawling campus in an old industrial district of Arles that will soon have a steel sheathed cubist looking building with the distinctive signature of American architect Frank Geary. This will apparently house design workshops, laboratories and other spaces to catalyze ecological solutions to everyday problems.
Prototypes of objects made from salt, algae, potato starch and other local materials at the Luma Foundation.
We arrived on a Saturday morning for the opening of an exhibit of 20th century French designer Jean Prouvé, perhaps best known in the United States for his elegant plywood and steel furniture. Prouvé was also an accomplished architect who spent many decades pioneering the field of prefabricated buildings that could be easily assembled and disassembled for a variety of applications: low-cost housing, emergency and military shelters, rural cabins, shops and businesses, and so on. The exhibit hall was an old foundry with fantastic high ceilings of steel beams that could have just as easily been a movie set. Inside were a dozen prototypes of Prouvé’s buildings featuring simple materials, wood floors, easily installable and modular panels — all with the touch of a master furniture fabricator. Despite work that spanned at least four decades, often under contract for the French government, we were told that Prouvé considered these beautiful exercises a failure as they were never adopted by the marketplace.
On the trail of our book, Building with Vision, Roberto and I visited a number of designers attempting to put together movable and easily assembled shelters. But Prouvé‘s genius flare for modular construction was clearly far ahead of his time. His use of materials was so elegant, his consideration of recycled and recyclable steel ingenious, his sense of comfort and practicality in the simple square form so profound. I can only hope such design intelligence can be brought to bear as Northern California begins the deep analysis it must undergo as it considers how to move forward after these devastating fires.