Ateliers Jean Prouvé— Demountable house 6x6, presentation drawing, no. 9691, May 1945. © Archives departementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, fonds des ateliers Jean Prouvé.
Jean Prouvé conceived the present design for a 6x6 meter demountable house as a structure to house French citizens of Lorraine and Franche-Comté displaced by World War II. Like Jean Prouvé’s wartime designs for temporary transportable buildings, the 6x6 was based on an axial frame and was produced in modular elements that could be assembled in just one day. It could be demounted and re-assembled multiple times. The frame elements were made in steel and due to the continuing wartime metal shortages the panels and foor were made in wood. Although Raoul Dautry, the French minister of Reconstruction and Urban Development, ordered 800 demountable houses, only about 400 were produced, of which a handful are known to have survived. The houses served as short-term shelters and production stopped when the French government chose to focus on permanent reconstruction eforts. These houses represent the height of Prouvé’s rationalist and functionalist ideals: mass-production, logical material choices and consistent engineering. Prouvé was typically modest in describing his success with pre-fabricated housing: “I didn’t invent an architectural system, I made it. I didn’t invent forms, I made an architectural system that had forms. I made it using bent sheet steel because I had the steel and the presses to bend it with. It’s as simple as that.” Le Corbusier was more direct about his friend and colleague’s accomplishments, saying of Prouvé in 1954: “His postwar work has lef its mark everywhere, decisively.”
Jean Prouvé, interior view of the 6x6 demountable house. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
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