From the archive: DIY shelter

摘要

Jean Prouvé's debut in Domus magazine, subtitled by Ernesto Nathan Rogers the "House of Man", dates from 1946 {Domus 210, June 1946). The house proposed by the "finest metalsmith" - and whose talents Le Corbusier had sought out in the same period for the interiors of the cells in his Unite d'Habitation in Marseille - was one for every man.Italy had just come through the war and was drawn to the research into prefabricated houses that Prouvé had centred around the definition of its metal structure. Intrigued by lightness, he dismantled the formal rhetoric of architecture and prioritised the versatility of technology as a means to satisfy its social vocation from a standpoint that was both pragmatic and optimal. Reducing architecture to assembly (which his student Renzo Piano later defined as the "piece by piece" approach) may have seemed to be limiting it to the sphere of carpentry but the drive behind his self-effacing and unpretentious research stemmed rather from the tradition of the French Enlightenment, so memorably expressed in Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's celebrated image of Labri dupauvre.