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Concept
Jean Prouvé
Summary
Jean Prouvé (8 April 1901 – 23 March 1984) was a French metal worker, self-taught architect and designer. Le Corbusier designated Prouvé a constructeur, blending architecture and engineering. Prouvé's main achievement was transferring manufacturing technology from industry to architecture, without losing aesthetic qualities. His design skills were not limited to one discipline. During his career Jean Prouvé was involved in architectural design, industrial design, structural design and furniture design.
Prouvé was born in Nancy, France, the second of seven children of the artist Victor Prouvé and the pianist Marie Duhamel. The Prouvés belonged to a lively artistic circle, which included the glass artist Emile Gallé, and the furniture designer Louis Majorelle. Jean grew up surrounded by the ideals and energy of the École de Nancy, the art collective to which his father belonged. Its goals were to make art readily accessible, to forge links between art and industry, as well as between art and social consciousness. Their tenets became ultimately a powerful influence on his body of work. "I was raised," Prouvé says, "in a world of artists and scholars, a world which nourished my mind."
Between 1914 and 1917, Jean Prouvé spent three years in the school of fine arts of Nancy. Then, he was first apprenticed to a blacksmith, Émile Robert in Enghien (near Paris), and then to the parisian metal workshop of Aldabert Szabo. In Nancy in 1923 he opened what would be the first in a string of his own workshops and studios. He produced wrought iron lamps, chandeliers, hand rails and began designing furniture like his "Chaise inclinable" of 1924. As a craftsman in wrought iron, he was commissioned between 1923 and 1939 by local architects as Jean Bourgon, Pierre Le Bourgeois, Raphaël Oudeville or Alfred Thomas to contribute to their Art deco projects. He abandoned gradually the decorative style of that time to prefer smooth surfaces of folded metal plates. He used this material to design storefronts, elevators or furniture (for student housing in 1932, for example).
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