Prouvé, Prometheus of pre-fabrication, Prince of panels, Titan of tension. Throbbing with civic duty and desire, fragrant with the smell of oil, ink, and sweat. Seducer of function entwined with the future. Prouvé invents events: an architecture for better days. Architecture that rises, no, thrusts, from the sacred and scarred flesh of the city, fevered with velocity, in ecstatic worship of its comestible, trembling, shimmering dynamism.
Ceilings hover with surgical perversity, exposed and clinical, mimicking breath and sweat and skin. Modular parts, organs of an intimate whole. Embodiments in gesture: the levity of a shutter, the kink of a beam, the tender friction of metal on metal. A house forged of sinews and existenzminum. Erections of bent, compressed, riveted metal.
Metal and glass retract bewitchingly. Pliable slats and panels manoeuvre with anatomical precision, peeling back to open and to expose. Surfaces flex and apertures gape. Tactile tectonics supply glide and guide to manipulate and to control. A mechanical undressing; the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. Mounted and demounted with hydraulic grace. Joinery like injury, every detail a wound.
Mechanical organs yearning for unbearable lightness; a lust for perforation, rupture, repair. The firm seduction of industrial grammar: exacting tectonics and transferred loads. Axial beams and aluminum cladding abut in sensual pleasure. The rhythm of efficiency: intimations both public and private. Mergers of purpose and desire. Machine-staged caresses. Raw embraces of surface, space, tension, and extension.
Function made flesh. Every seam, a declaration of detail. Every module, the coy metallic whisper of a secret. The maison-machine moans orgiastically in the voice of all the people inside her cantilevered frame. She is not a building, she is an action. A carnal union of labour and form in flagrante delicto.
-Daniel Ayat