La Maison Tropicale, Paris 1949. Interior surface 180 square feet, terrace 500 square feet.
Jean Prouvés Tropical House as photographed by Bernard Renoux in Brazzaville in 1996. (Copyright Bernard Renoux: http://www.renoux-photo.com )
La Maison Tropicale by Jean Prouvé, beside Queensboro Bridge, NYC 2007.The Maison Tropicale is a beautiful modernist artefact designed in 1951 by visionary French architect Jean Prouvé.
The Masion Tropicale really was a flat-pack house, and it was way ahead of its time - not for nothing has Prouvé been labelled "the godfather of high tech" (he was also on the judging panel for the Pompidou Centre). It was designed to be flown out to remote parts of Africa in cargo planes, to house French colonials so it is made entirely of flat, lightweight aluminium and steel pieces, standing on concrete stilts. Built for tropical temperatures, it features an ingenious natural ventilation system - using heat on the double roof of the house to draw in fresh air through openings in the walls and up into the ceiling. There are also adjustable sunshades around the veranda, double-skinned insulated walls and sliding doors while little circular portholes of blue glass protect from UV ray.
Only three of these houses were made in Niger and Congo, since the 50s until 2000 when Eric Touchaleaume found them, shipped them back and got them restored.
The one of the three 1951 prototypes, originally installed in Brazzaville, was bought by the New Yorker hotelier André Balazs for $ 4,968,000 ($ 5,028 per square foot) and has been lent for public view until April the 13th in front of the Tate Modern museum in London, waiting to end up as the centerpiece of some sort of environmentally sound resort in Central America.
The Maison Tropicale was also taken as theme of investigation by Angela Ferreira, chosen to represent Portugal at the 52th Venice Biennale.
The artist presented her work "Maison Tropicale", consisting of a large-scale installation, which includes sculptural and documentary elements alluding to colonial history and to contemporary colonial phenomena.
Angela Ferreira continues her investigations into the ways in which European modernism adapted or failed to adapt to the realities of the African continent, situated conceptually between the failure of modernism in the so-called centres, and the conflicting impact of colonizers attempting to implement modernism across Africa.
The critical proposition is shared by Manthia Diawara, which follows Ferreira's visits to the sites where the prototypes of the houses were installed in Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Niamey in Niger, as well as the subsequent reclamation (see the titles in the press official page:"saved from the jungle") of the prototypes by the Western art world. In a 58-minute film he shows the story of Mirelle Ngasté, the last owner of the Brazzaville Prouvé's house. The premier of the film took place on March th 10th in Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, with the opening of "Hard rain show" by Angela Ferreira and the Berardo Collection Museum.
maison tropicale in london http://www.lamaisontropicale.com/www/ http://www.designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2008/prouvehouse
maison tropical by angela ferreira and manthia diawara http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/4202 http://www.michaelstevenson.com/contemporary/exhibitions/ferreira/ferreira_diawara.htm http://www.artafrica.info/html/eventos/evento_i.php?id=2049
1 comment:
Boa descoberta.
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