Jean Prouv's Maison Tropicale: The Poetics of the Colonial Object

In June 2007, Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated aluminium bungalow known as the Maison Tropicale was sold at auction in New York for $4,968,000 (see Figure 1). Prior to the sale, the Maison was displayed on the banks of the Seine in Paris, and following the sale, in front of London’s Tate Modern. While the multi-million dollar price tag attracted newspaper headlines, from a design perspective, critics highlighted Prouvé’s innovative design that used industrial technologies and prefabrication techniques. Indeed, a factoryproduced metallic house such as the Maison Tropicale seemed to embody Le Corbusier’s description of the modern house as a “machine for living in.” Designed by Prouvé in 1951, the Maison was transported to a French colonial city in Africa, where it remained for almost 50 years. In 2005, Prouvé scholar Robert Rubin described the Maison’s return from Africa: “...the Tropical House of Brazzaville (1951), recently exported from the Congo and restored in France, has recovered its original identity as an industrial object.”1 A major touring exhibition, Jean Prouvé: the Poetics of the Technical Object, originating in Germany’s Vitra Design Museum in the same year, confirmed this identification of the Maison Tropicale as an icon of industrial modernism.2 However, while the Maison Tropicale continues to be lauded as an exemplary industrial object, its identity as a colonial object remains obscured. The Maison Tropicale’s history is particularly intriguing as it clearly illuminates a largely repressed relationship between European

[1]  Victor Margolin,et al.  Design in History , 2009, Design Issues.

[2]  Tristan Guilloux The Maison “Tropique” , 2008 .