A walk down to the UCLA Hammer Museum will reveal an unusual
transformation of its courtyard. The site has been turned into a
construction site for a house, a tropical home designed more than
50 years ago in Europe that has stood proudly on two subsequent
continents.
The design for the house began in 1949, when two French
government architects stationed in Africa were frustrated with the
stuffy nighttime temperatures of the cement building in which they
were stationed. The two men turned to designer Jean Prouvé and
asked him to create a prefabricated house that would be easy to
assemble in France’s African colonies and would be suitable
for the warm climate.
Prouvé responded by building a very green, very portable
house made out of aluminum and steel. He endeavored to construct it
out of the smallest number of pieces possible. And, he wanted each
piece to be flat, so that they could be stacked and packed into two
standard-sized shipping containers and transported in the hold of a
cargo plane to their destination. The vast majority of the pieces
are made out of aluminum. No piece is bigger than four meters, and
none is heavier than 100 kilograms, so that each can be carried
without difficulty by just two men.
And taking into account the original problem facing the two
Frenchmen, Prouvé included a suspended floor and ventilation
chimney so that the house was habitable in Africa in a time before
air-conditioning.
The final destination of this first Tropical House was Niamey,
Niger, but Prouvé went on to build two more for officers of
the Regional Bureau of Aluminum Information in Brazzaville, Congo
in the summer of 1951.
The particular house on display at the Hammer was one of the
homes destined for the latter locale, where it remained for 49
years, when it was disassembled, packed up, and sent back to France
to be restored in Prouvé’s Maxéville workshop. And,
after a layover in New Haven, Conn., where the house was once again
put together and torn down at Yale University’s gallery, it
will continue its nomadic existence by remaining at UCLA for a
little while.
Construction on the house began on Oct. 4 at the Hammer Museum,
and the house will remain on display until its deinstallation
begins on Nov. 27.
Hommages to the French designer are springing up all over town.
The Museum of Contemporary Art presents “Jean Prouvé:
Three Nomadic Structures” at its Pacific Design center (the
exhibit features some of Prouvé’s infamous furniture and
photographs of his architectural structures). There is also an
exhibit in UCLA’s Perloff Hall, “Jean Prouvé:
Drawings and Photographs of A Tropical House” to complement
the Hammer display, and an architectural conference and home tours
titled “Prefab Now,” which is put on by the Hammer and
Dwell magazine and takes place at the end of the month.
Watching the assembly and disassembly of the house plays an
integral part in the exhibit itself, as well as in understanding
Prouvé’s architectural philosophy that his structures
should be stripped down, minimalistic designs that celebrate
function rather than an elaborate, ornate style.
“The way the house is designed reveals itself in the
process of assembly,” the exhibit’s curator Robert
Rubin said. “If you watch it go up, you will understand how
it’s designed, and why. … Prouvé was very much in this
French tradition that style is derived from function ““
something good is something that works.”
Prouvé’s devotion to materials such as aluminum and
steel can be attributed to his training as an industrial engineer
and his modern faith in technology as the answer to the problems of
the world, especially concerning mass housing.
“Particularly in France, people were influenced by the
model of Ford, and there were a lot of architects wanting to make a
house like how you make a car,” said Sylvia Lavin, chairwoman
of the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. “You
have to look at Prouvé with a refined eye, in that he suffered
from an overly optimistic faith in technology that characterizes
Europe before World War II. But, by the same token, he was also
interested in softening the technology. The (Tropical) House looks
like an elaborately crafted piece of furniture rather than a gun or
a Quonset hut. Most military housing is very brutal looking, and
there is nothing brutal about Prouvé.”
Indeed, contemporary gallerygoers today may cringe at
Prouvé’s unswerving confidence in technology, but there
is still much to appreciate in the aesthetic quality of his
designs.
“Prouvé combined hard, industrial materials with his
tremendous sense of the body,” Lavin said. “He was
already anticipating the post-modern interest in combining the body
with artifice.”
This style has always been obvious in Prouvé’s
furniture designs, which have long fetched high prices at auctions.
Yet Rubin hopes that those who see the house at the Hammer will see
Prouvé’s architecture in a new light.
“I started buying Prouvé’s furniture a long
time ago and realized there was more to him than chairs,” he
said. “You have to separate Prouvé’s aesthetics
from Prouvé’s philosophy. If Prouvé was alive
today, his work wouldn’t look anything like what it does.
Post-modern (furniture) sellers have decontextualized him. My goal
is to take Prouvé back from the decorators and re-present him
as an architect, as the godfather of prefab.”
In contrast to most of his architectural buildings, the Tropical
House is considered a pure Prouvé work because he controlled
everything from its earliest design drafts to its construction at
his Maxéville factory.
“He made it at Maxéville. Nobody screwed it up saying
it would look better if you added cement,” Rubin said.
“A lot of his buildings have been bastardized.”
However, it is essential to note that Prouvé’s
Tropical House is a prototype, as he was never able to succeed at
putting his house into industrial production, the ultimate goal of
a prefab architect. Prouvé took much of the money that he
earned through his furniture and lost it on his industrial
buildings. He eventually went bankrupt and lost his factory.
Yet, ever practical and resourceful, Prouvé loaded up his
truck with the leftover metal pieces, recycling them to build his
own home. And, his fascination with industrial materials led him to
experiment with plastics in the 1960s and ’70s.
But despite the fact that he was never able to mass-produce his
prefab houses, he remains an inspiration to today’s prefab
architects and enthusiasts.
“This house is pretty much it when it comes to seeing
Prouvé’s designs outside of France. The Tropical House
is a mecca for prefab enthusiasts,” said Allison Arieff,
editor of Dwell magazine and co-author of “Prefab.”
“His accessibility, smart engineering, and credibility
speak to people about what is important in prefab architecture.
It’s like a pure form of all the ideas people are exploring
right now. Plus, you can’t replicate the experience of seeing
the real thing.”
Prefab housing is in virtually every American community today,
and the vast majority of those cookie-cutter suburban houses
don’t even involve an architect. People like Rubin and Arieff
see prefab homes that involve an architect as a cost efficient way
to build one’s dream house by allowing for many versions on
one theme.
Rubin said he hopes that people leave the exhibit with "a
restored sense of hope about the possibilities of industrial
housing that is not just cheap and ugly.”
Yet Prouvé, who was always faithful to the idea of function
in his designs, would no doubt smile at seeing his Tropical House
on display at the Hammer.
“He’d probably be a little entertained (by seeing
his house in an art museum),” Arieff said. “It’s
a little bit like the Ikea of their time being in a
museum.”