FINDING MYSELF IN NEW HAVEN
last sprang, I dropped by the strangely brooding Art and Architecture Building
to see how it was holding up. Paul Rudolph’s concrete castle still looks
fabulously imposing from the street; the interior, once I found the steep and
narrow stairs to the entrance, was the dark, cold cave I remembered from a
visit to Yale twenty years ago. But here I discovered something quite
delightful: a brightly lit shelter made of pale taupe and green enameled sheet
metal perforated with blue glass portholes. The shape, color, and substance of
the structure gave It the look of an oversize
mechanical toy. As it turned out, the little bulldog was purely utilitarian, a
prefabricated house conceived and built by the French construction Jean Prouvé
for use In colonial
Prouvé is best known for his
astringently functional, mostly metal furniture, but he was so enamored of
pressed steel and aluminum that he wanted to use them for all aspects of modern
living. Driven by a love of machine-made efficiency, he envisioned portability
as the fullest expression of modernity and eventually Invented flat-pack homes
that could be erected with ease. His first essay In this form was a little
steel-and- glass cabin, light and airy, codesigned with Eugene Beaudoin and Marcel Lods and
Intended for use by workers enjoying a newly Introduced government mandate: the
paid vacation During the war years, he refined this building system to create
barracks, class- rooms, dining halls, and dormitories for the French army.
After the war he repurposed these military structures to develop housing units,
eventually receiving a commission to modify the system for use in the colonial
tropics. One prototype was Installed in Niamey, Niger, In 1949 and the other in
Brazzaville, Congo, in 1951 It was a section of the latter, reconstructed In
part from the original pieces, that appeared at Yale In the 2005 traveling
exhibition “Jean Prouvé: A Tropical House,” curated by Robert Rubin.
My first encounter with
this structure involved an element of play. I had the pleasure of tracking down
sections of the original prototype too corroded to be restored but nevertheless
displayed in the dark nooks and crannies of Rudolph’s tower-and felt a certain
frisson on fingering the bullet holes in one panel. (Oh, what dark secrets are
being withheld here?) The strangeness of the experience was underscored by an
absurd video also on view, in which a group of French intellectuals,
wineglasses in hand, wander the reconstructed house In the manner of characters
in Marguerite Duras’s India Song—except obviously
within an easy drive of Paris, not in some distant colony. A second viewing,
when the house moved to the UCLA Hammer courtyard this autumn, provided a
chance for further consideration. Here, approximately half the building, a
twenty-foot- square cube floating on a veranda, was nestled in a bamboo glade:
It was a pavilion rather than a house, the perfect foil for a midcentury modern cocktail party, an exotic variant on the
designs for indoor/outdoor living that are such an iconic part of Los Angeles
culture. But as a home, this model stood coldly apart. The chill came from the
realization that, in line with the dogged, industrial optimism of the postwar
years, this was a room that could be easily hosed down.
Prouvé was a rationalist
and an idealist, determined to use his engineering skills to solve problems
impeding the smooth management of the French colonies. His first task was to
design housing for administrative functionaries that could withstand a climate
of high temperatures and humidity and a four-month season of torrential rain. The
houses would need to be inexpensive and easily delivered. Prouvé’s design was
technically brilliant. Using the same light materials as Ford and Boeing-extruded
aluminum and sheet steel-he designed the central structure of the tropical
house as a pair of two-legged metal portals that would provide stability in
strong horizontal winds. The whole house floats over a raised base built in
situ, providing a layer of insulation below and thus preventing dampness. Outer
louvers direct breezes, and along with the shiny beige exterior and the
blue-tinted portholes, also deflect sunlight. It sounds convincing, another
case of modern design savvy defeating the elements. But the house in
Neither this show nor a
small companion exhibit at the
THOMAS LAWSON IS DEAN OF THE