“NEVER DESIGN ANYTHING THAT CANNOT BE MADE”.
From skeleton to fashion
An insight into Jean Prouve’s works.
In todays times, we have a very carefully bifurcated product-specific streams. It seems a trouble for us to see everything as a whole . This categorization often leads to an incompleteness in understanding of its making and other design decisions. Its almost impossible to ‘see’ a building in layers , in the sense , one cannot understand one aspect of building devoid of other aspects.
Jean Prouve, a constructional ideologist, believed there was no difference in making a building or making a furniture. Depending on the materials used or structure dominating, the inside space gets generated. Prouve’s modernism was championed by a fine blend of architectural design, structural design, industrial design and furniture design. The absence of any of one of these aspects would have shook the wholeness of his purpose and designs. His use of aluminum and steel and its radical originality was also its commercial cross to bear. According to Kenneth Frampton,” Prouve belongs to that indigenous school of French Constructivism where the exploitation of any material to the limit of its structural capacity was seen as integral to an inherently Gallic sense of economy which the Anglo-American world has always found itself less ready to accept.” Although the Tropical house is a ‘building’ in the traditional sense of the word, its underlying constructive system is a historical fact.
Expressing his commitment to industrially -produced architecture, Prouve wrote of the need to bring architects closer to manufacturing. As a result, the Tropical house as a prefabricated structure reveals itself even better in the act of assembly . And by that very act its clearly understood how each element plays important role in making of the whole building. The aesthetic appeal which the ‘perforations’ give in the name of openings contribute to the softer quality of the poetics of the technical.
Prouve’s buildings reflect complete image of the structure itself and evidently today the architecture has been lost in the process of this modern world’s process of fragmentation. The pre-manufacture component of sketching in any design process was not popular for Prouve. Thus, the designed actually happened after the making and through it. His rejection towards uniformity was was not an inherent consequence of industrialized construction.
The porthole wall panels, the louvered blinds on the outside of the house, the long rectangular shape of the houses and the raised floors were used to exploit ventilation. Thus, he deliberately seeked alternatives to a set of climatic and geologic constraints thereby not making any design solution less in anyway.
His rejection to the idea of component architecture is also seen in the purpose of his buildings. Architecture used as a tool in bringing about transformation in social problems was what he built the tropical house for. The idea emerging with universalism ; breaking up of the fragmented ideas and ideologies in the modern world.
By this law of universality, he could not separate interior with exterior. Technically, the materials and construction techniques formed its own character within inside along with the furniture he designed. The aspect of functionality was of utmost importance to Prouve which is evident in his house forms which are very mediocre and simple.
Renzo Piano said ,
” The fundamental truth that one must not separate the head and hand, that architecture is a matter of building not drawing, that it must be a deep understanding of materials that give rise to forms.”
Prouve’s belief of being an architect as well as engineer together is really seen in the spaces he conceived by usage of engineering techniques combined with design solutions because the very fact of building was what mattered to him rather than the disciplines which was seen as limiting factor in architecture.
“Architect? Engineer? Why raise the question, why debate it? The important thing is to build…”
