By Natalia Rachlin
Wallpaper, June 11, 2015
York might not be an obvious place to go looking for Jean Prouvé masterpieces, but down an unremarkable dirt road nestled amid yellow rapeseed feilds, inside a hangar- sized warehouse, sure enough, there’s a six-metre-square Prouvé demountable house sitting in a corner, looking rather quaint. Its weathered steel-and-timber frame reveals the 70-odd years that have passed since it was originally built in 1944, as part of an order for emergency housing from the Ministry of Reconstruction and Town Planning, to rehouse war victims in bomb-ravaged France.
(Image: Patrick Seguin and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) have come together to work on the adaption of an original demountable disaster-relief house designed by Jean Prouvé in 1944. Courtesy of Wallpaper, photo by Daniel Stier)
Nearby, two newly commissioned, unfinished rocket-shaped pods, their insulation and metal framework still exposed, are propped on stilts as if preparing for take-of. When completed, the cylindrical capsules, designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP), will host kitchen and bathroom facilities that can be attached to the Prouvé house. Come mid-June, new and old will combine to transform a structure once intended as a disaster relief shelter into a modern holiday retreat that will be showcased at Design Miami/Basel by the Paris-based Galerie Patrick Seguin. Read more…