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Jean Prouve: Seminal Architect
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18507 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
1,778 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth Powell
Kenneth Powell is an architecture writer for the London Daily
Telegraph. |
The name of Jean Prouve (1901-1984) remains, in comparison with those of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and the other founders of the Modern Movement in architecture, relatively unknown. Yet Prouve, a dominant figure on the French architectural and engineering scene for longer than half a century, deserves to be celebrated as a designer of remarkable imagination who strove to harness technological advances to the benefit of humanity. In the context of the recent fashion for high-tech architecture, his achievements gain in stature. Prouve, it appears, anticipated many decades ago some of the principal themes and most innovative features of that school of design. Furthermore, as the international world of architecture comes to terms with pluralism and the dogmas of the past are laid to rest, Prouve's insistence on good craftsmanship and concern for quality of construction before style seem all the more relevant. He can be claimed, not unreasonably, as a pioneer of the humane, pragmatic modernism that is a growing influence on the architects of the 1990s.
Ripe for Reassessment
In short, the time is ripe for a reassessment of Prouve and the major exhibition, Jean Prouve: Constructeur, shown recently (until January 28, 1991) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and now moving to other venues, meets the need magnificently. (It was Corbusier who gave Prouve this title--the only one, the great architect felt, which summed up his varied talents.) The exhibition has been designed by Renzo Piano, co-architect (with Richard Rogers) of the Pompidou Centre, whose own career owes more than a little to Prouve's insight. For it was Prouve, twenty years ago, who chaired the jury that awarded the Pompidou commission to Piano and Rogers. Built of steel and glass to an undisguised machine aesthetic the Centre embodied many of his own ideals. It is, indeed, hardly surprising that Piano calls Prouve his "spiritual father."
The roots of the Modern Movement are to be sought, of course, both in the nineteenth century engineering tradition and in the Arts and Crafts Movement, with its relentless emphasis on structural integrity, a rationalistic approach to ornament and, above all, "honesty." Gropius' Bauhaus took its initial inspiration from the doctrines of John Ruskin and William Moris. In France, those ideas found less fertile ground. The France of the Belle Epoque, that golden age which ended in 1914, was diverted by the fancies of Art Nouveau. The Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris spawned a host of fancifully over-decorated structures, laid out, ironically enough, in the shadow of Eiffel's great tower, which remains as a
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