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Centre Georges PompidouJean Prouvé designed the Maison Tropicale for expatriates.
![The New York Times]()
July 1, 2004
Out of Africa, a House Fit for a Kit Bag
By ALASTAIR GORDON
RESLES, France
On Thursday morning, June 24, more than 200 architects, critics and other members of the international design world descended on this picturesque village 20 miles north of Paris to witness the rebirth of the Maison Tropicale, an early masterpiece of prefab architecture rescued from the Congo Republic, where it was the home of a French sales representative.The house, made entirely of sheet metal and aluminum, stood on a patch of lawn outside the workshop of Alain Banneel, the craftsman who helped restore it.
"Ça, c'est la valise," Mr. Banneel said, pointing to its "suitcase," a blue shipping container waiting to transport the house to its next destination.
The guests were greeted on the porch by Robert Rubin, a retired New York commodities trader and collector of rare cars and Modernist furniture, who paid more than $1 million to retrieve the house from Brazzaville, capital of the Congo Republic, during a civil war, and restore it to its original condition. As guests filed in, Mr. Rubin pointed out a series of ragged punctures in the sheet-metal ceiling. "Those are bullet holes made by Kalashnikovs," he said.
The guests included Catherine Prouvé Drouhin, the daughter of Jean Prouvé, who designed the Maison Tropicale more than 50 years ago.
"I know that my father would have been delighted by this adventure in the archaeology of the modern," she said.
Mr. Prouvé, who died in 1984, is best known for his elegantly industrial metal furniture, which has become fashionable among collectors over the last decade. A dining table made in 1952 for the Air France office in Brazzaville was sold at auction by Phillips de Pury & Company in 2002 for $125,000, and the company sold a pair of aluminum door panels (similar to those in the Maison Tropicale) last month for $254,000. (The pre-auction estimate was for $50,000 to $70,000.)
"There's an insatiable thirst for Prouvé furniture," said James Zemaitis, director of 20th-century design at Sotheby's. "The reason for the huge upswing in price is that Prouvé is now recognized as one of the most influential European architects of the 20th century — especially when you look at his contributions to low-income housing and mobile housing. He was vastly underrated until recently."
The newly restored Maison Tropicale should help solidify Mr. Prouvé's place among major 20th-century architects. Le Corbusier once said that Prouvé "combines the soul of an engineer with that of an architect." But he was trained neither as an engineer nor as an architect. Rather, he was a builder-fabricator with a poetic understanding of humble materials like pressed tin, aluminum and plywood.
In 1949, Mr. Prouvé and Henri Prouvé, his brother, won a competition staged by the French government under De Gaulle to design inexpensive housing and administrative buildings for France's African colonies.
Their Maison Tropicale could be broken down as a kit of parts, packed snugly onto a cargo plane and flown to the outposts of the country's dwindling post-World War II empire.
The house sat four feet off the ground, resting on 15 concrete posts. The walls were made of a series of sheet-metal panels that slide into different positions on overhead tracks to adjust to weather and season. Each panel was perforated with 27 portholes, some of which are filled with panes of blue-tinted glass to reduce the glare of the equatorial sun. The house is surrounded by a narrow terrace made of planks of African hardwood.
Mr. Prouvé also developed an ingenious system for natural cooling. Air was drawn up through openings, and it circulated through the house and then vented through an elongated chimney that ran like a spine the length of the roof. The outer skin of sheet metal reflected the heat, while three tiers of ridged aluminum louvers could be angled to block the sun as it moved across the sky.
There is something unmistakably Gallic about the Prouvé sense of proportion, as if the pristine forms of Mies van der Rohe had been reinterpreted by Jacques Tati, the great French comedian of errors.
Several prototypes were fabricated at Mr. Prouvé's atelier in Maxeville, outside Nancy. One was shipped to Niamey, capital of Niger, and two to Brazzaville, then capital of the French colony of Middle Congo. The two that went to Brazzaville were assembled on the same property — one as the house, the other as an office for a French company that sold aluminum products, including Prouvé structures. In a sense, the Maison Tropicale was an advertisement for the company.
The other Brazzaville structure and the house in Niamey were eventually disassembled and shipped back to Paris, where they are now stored in a warehouse.
Mr. Rubin found the Prouvé works in a roundabout fashion, almost by accident.
"I migrated into 20th-century design as part of a larger midlife crisis that included a divorce and a change of profession," said Mr. Rubin, who in 2001 left the American International Group, where he had been a founder of a commodity and currency trading subsidiary, and enrolled in a doctoral program at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning.
"My interest in Prouvé grew out of my interest in vintage cars," said Mr. Rubin, who owns a stable of prize racing cars and at one time employed two full-time mechanics to keep them in mint condition. He gave his wife, Stéphane, a rare Citroën Deux Chevaux model called the 2CV Sahara 4x4. Like the Maison Tropicale, it was specially designed for equatorial Africa.
It's not that much of a leap from a Deux Chevaux to the mechanical elegance of the Prouvé furniture that Mr. Rubin began collecting in the mid-1990's. Mr. Rubin now owns 25 pieces, including a Kangaroo chair from the 1940's, a Bureau President and other pieces.
"Prouvé thought of himself not so much as an architect or designer, but as a `constructeur,' " he said. "He believed that the process of construction was as important as the design process, that designer and fabricator had to work as one."
One guest at the unveiling who took particular interest in the house's mechanical elegance was Patrice Bartoli, who had worked in Brazzaville as a French government architect.
"I first saw the house in 1982, but no one was interested in Prouvé then," Mr. Bartoli said.
On a later visit, he learned that the owner was planning to tear it down. He got in touch with the French ambassador and the Friends of Jean Prouvé in Paris, a group dedicated to preserving the Prouvé legacy.
Mr. Rubin heard about the house in 1997 and began organizing a search-and-restore mission with Eric Touchaleaume, a Paris dealer whose knack for bringing goods back from remote locations has won him a reputation as the Indiana Jones of Modernist artifacts.
Mr. Touchaleaume, who has a shaved head and the stocky frame of a rugby player, has been scouring the former French colonies — including Cameroon, Niger and Morocco — for two decades in search of lost Modernist works.
"But for me the Holy Grail was the Maison Tropicale," he said. "That was the best."
In 1997, Brazzaville was hardly a safe destination for antiquing. A civil war had broken out in the Congo Republic after the former Marxist president, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, was reinstalled. Rebel groups from the south moved into Brazzaville, and there was shooting in the streets in the neighborhood of the Maison Tropicale.
Undaunted, Mr. Touchaleaume hired local bodyguards and found the house off a back street. Ownership of the house was under dispute, and Mr. Touchaleaume had to negotiate with two families for six months before making a deal.
"It was very complicated," he said.
At first it seemed a lost cause. The structure was riddled with bullet holes and overgrown with tropical vegetation. A team of workers disassembled the house, as if it were one of Mr. Rubin's vintage racing cars, and packed it carefully into steel shipping containers.
All the parts arrived safely in Paris, and the question now was what to do with it. Rather than cannibalize the parts and sell them for what Mr. Rubin called "decorator's fodder," he was committed to preserving the structure as an architectural entity.
Christian Enjolras, a French architect who had studied with Mr. Prouvé in the 1960's, was asked to oversee the restoration. More than 1,000 parts were cleaned and restored to working order on the grounds of Mr. Banneel's atelier in Presles.
"It was just like putting an old race car back together," Mr. Rubin said.
Even the original insulation inside the metal panels was painstakingly removed, treated with insecticide and re-inserted.
The restorers found that aside from some corrosion, the metallic structure was remarkably well preserved after a half-century in the tropics, thanks to layers of paint applied over the years. The bullet holes were retained as part of the building's history, but the metal walls were stripped and repainted their original green.
As a bus arrived to take the guests back to Paris, Mr. Rubin paused to admire his trophy.
"It's a total folly as a project," he said, given its cost. "But it's an amazing artifact of its time."
The house can be disassembled and sent anywhere in two shipping containers, but Mr. Rubin said he had not decided its destination.
Officials from French cultural institutions attended the event and have expressed interest in it, but no agreement has been reached. Mr. Rubin is also considering shipping the house to the United States, where it could become the subject of a preservation study at Columbia University.
Or he might convert it for use as a pavilion on the Bridgehampton golf course he owns.
"This is an open-ended adventure," he said.
Lars Klove for The New York TimesRobert Rubin, in one of his prized Citroëns, has unveiled another collectible, a 1949 prefab metal house by Jean Prouvé, designed to flatten for shipment to the French colonies.
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