CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/6/2015

Jean Prouvé Architecture: 5 Volume Box Set

Featured image is the November 1945 cover of the French architecture magazine, L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui, featuring prefabricated housing by Jean Prouvé and Pierre Jeanneret. The famous architectural collaborators' BCC Demountable House (produced in very limited quantities during wartime, 1941-43) is the subject of volume 3 of Galerie Patrick Seguin's outstanding 5-volume boxed set, Jean Prouvé: Architecture. Each of the concise volumes in this exquisitely produced limited edition features cloth binding and a tipped on cover image, in addition to copious archival images, new photography and engaging scholarship. Together, the books come housed in a powder-coated steel slipcase, die cut on the front to accommodate a cover image. As Corbusier wrote in 1954, “Jean Prouvé embodies in a singularly harmonious way the ‘constructor’ not yet accepted by law but demanded by the era we live in. I mean by this that Jean Prouvé is, inseparably, architect and engineer. Or rather, architect and constructor, for everything he sets his hand to and designs immediately takes on elegant plastic form, offering brilliant solutions with regard to strength and manufacture. Not to speak of his character, among the finest there is. His postwar work has left its mark everywhere, decisively.”