Jean Prouvé's house

Jean Prouvé dreamed of creating homes as beautiful and rational as airplanes or automobiles. In 1953, at a time when he was going through the worst crisis of his life, he built his own house. Created in a hurry, out of bricks and mortar, it embodied his most innovative ideas. In a France where concrete was king, Prouvé was a man of metal, first folded sheet metal, then aluminum. From the 1930s onwards, he tried to rationalize the design of his buildings, dreaming of a housing industry that would build houses with the same precision with which cars and planes are built. This is what he calls "putting architecture back where it belongs". He is designing several models of low-cost, do-it-yourself kit homes, ready for mass production. Intelligent, functional and necessarily beautiful. The house he built for himself and his family in the heights of Nancy in the space of a few weeks in the summer of 1953, under dramatic circumstances, is a particularly moving embodiment of the designs and freedom of this genius builder, who is as much remembered today as Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel or Rem Koolhas.