Jean Prouvé, constructor — 1901-1984

Jean Prouvé was never an architect, and he insisted on the word: he called himself a constructor. The son of a painter, trained at the forge before he was trained in calculation, he spent his life demonstrating that a building could come out of a workshop the way a production part does, folded, bolted, carried away, re-erected somewhere else.

His career turns on a single shift: from art metalwork to folded sheet. The 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs made him abandon wrought iron for welding and thin steel; four years later he filed his first patents under the title of constructor and, with his friends, founded the Union des Artistes Modernes. Furniture, partitions, façades, whole houses: all came off the same machines.

The Maxéville works, which he set up near Nancy in 1947, were that idea at its height, a factory where drawing and making happened on the same day. It was from there that the two demountable schools of Bouqueval and Vantoux came in 1950. Two years later his shareholders shut him out of it. He would speak of it as a death.

The second half of his life was that of a man without a factory: a design office in Paris, the building department of CIMT and the invention of the curtain wall, a chair at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers where for thirteen years he taught how to read technical objects. In 1971, chairing the jury of a Paris competition, he pushed through the project of two unknowns, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers: the Centre Pompidou would be a steel structure, a modular façade, open floors. His principles, built by others.

The gallery occupies one of his two schools. That is the reason for this page: you cannot hang work inside a grid without knowing who set it out.