Jean Prouvé's demountable school — Vantoux, 1950

In 1949 the French Ministry of Education launched a competition for an industrialisable rural school: a model made in series and erected quickly, on any site. Entries had to come from two-part teams, an architect and a builder. Jean Prouvé entered with his brother Henri, an architect, and OTH as engineers. The Maxéville works were then at their height: they could turn out a building the way they turned out a production part.

The answer rests on a single principle. A steel portal frame planted along the axis of the building carries the roof; aluminium-faced façade panels hook on to either side. Nothing is laid in mortar, nothing is wet: everything bolts and clips together, dry, and comes apart the same way. The school measures eight metres by twenty-four.

Henri Prouvé turned that system into a school: a classroom, a workshop and a covered play area opening widely to the outside, sheltered by a gallery, with the teacher's lodging attached, a demountable Métropole house, eight metres by twelve. A complete school, set down in a meadow.

In May 1950 the State ordered two prototype sets. One was erected at Bouqueval, north of Paris; the other at Vantoux, on the edge of Metz. L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui devoted an article to them in March 1951. The long production run Prouvé hoped for never came: these two schools remain the only examples.

The Vantoux school served for some fifty years. It was listed as a historic monument by decree of 5 February 2001 — the school in its entirety, together with the sixteen desks and their seats and the teacher's desk, kept in an annexe. Its twin at Bouqueval, reinterpreted by Jean Nouvel, was re-erected in the Tuileries gardens in 2016.

The gallery has occupied the school since 2024. What still strikes you is the candour of the joints: the metal does not disguise itself, everything shows how the building stands and how light crosses it. Every hang begins as a negotiation with that grid, the architecture sets the measure for whatever is shown inside it, and that is precisely what makes each exhibition unlike what it would have been anywhere else.