Jean Prouvé (* 8. April 1901 in Paris/France; † 23. March 1984 in Nancy/France), was trained as a metal artisan under Emile Robert, Enghien and Szabo in Paris. In 1924 he opened his own workshop in Nancy and began to produce his first furnishings made of formed sheet steel in 1925. He was a founding member of the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM) in 1930. In the following year he established his own manufacturing firm, Les Ateliers Jean Prouvé. During the 1930s, the company produced numerous furniture designs, as well as some of the first prefabricated architectural elements, including components for the Maison du Peuple in Clichy (in collaboration with the architects Beaudoin and Lods), whose steel-and-glass structure attracted a great deal of attention. Due to the scarcity of steel during the Second World War, Prouvé constructed wood furniture and developed simple houses made out of prefabricated parts. Active in the French Résistance, Prouvé was elected mayor of Nancy after the city was liberated. He designed and constructed residential buildings for the homeless. In 1947 he established the Maxéville factory, a facility of 25,000 square meters in which furnishings, prefabricated homes and schools were produced by 200 employees. Among the most famous pieces from Prouvé's Maxéville production included the Bahut sideboard. Due to disagreements with the majority shareholders, Jean Prouvé left the company in 1953. After working as head of the construction office of the Compagnie Industrielle de Matériel de Transport (CIMT) in Paris between 1957-68, Prouvé ran his own architectural consulting firm in Paris from 1968-84. He taught as professor at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) from 1957-70. As chairman of the jury for the Centre Pompidou architectural competition in 1971, he played a major role in selecting the design of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Between 1980-84, Prouvé again turned his attention to the further development of his furniture designs. In many of his works, Jean Prouvé achieved the goal of uniting functional requirements, the honest use of materials and economical concerns with the complex demands of mass production. Beginning in 2002, and in close collaboration with the Prouvé family, Vitra has devoted itself to the re-edition of numerous designs by this great constructeur.
...France As the man who led French design from the stylistic confusion of Art Deco to the simplicity of modernism, and who then pushed modernism further and made it accept its social responsibility, French coach Jean Prouve understands the function of contemporary design perhaps better than any other...
By way of an addendum to our 5 New Design Exhibitions for November 2015 post, the Kaiserslautern University of Technology's Architecture Gallery are hosting "Jean Prouvé - vom System zum Haus" - "Jean Prouvé - from system to house" - in which the results of a...
In comparison to the annual IMM Cologne furniture fair the corridors and halls of the Messe Cologne always seems curiously empty at the biennial Orgatec office furniture trade fair. Until that is one reaches the Vitra stand. And the crowds. The almost...
While the art world is awash with anecdotes of cleaners disposing of installations having confused them for rubbish, we're not aware of any works of designer furniture having suffered a similar fate. At Design Miami Basel 2014 however Milan based Erastudio...
Whereas, generally speaking, those designers we feature in these pages have trained as either an architect or carpenter, Jean Prouvé was a blacksmith. Or more correctly a ferronniers d'art. An ornamental blacksmith. A training that was to give him a singular...
