Jean Prouvé Comes to Marseille
Buying hundreds of Jean Prouvé chairs from a university refectory, decades ago, made a specialist out of Éric Touchaleaume, owner of Galerie 54 in Paris. More recently, near Marseilles, Touchaleaume purchased a 7-acre hillside property, La Friche l’Escalette, a former lead mine, as a venue to display larger Prouvé designs, specifically the steel-framed pavilions. His Habitat Tropical du Cameroun, a prototype school he designed with Atelier LWD in 1958, is there this summer, the first time it’s even been displayed. Other Prouvé buildings are slated to follow in 2018 and 2021. For the years in between, Touchaleaume is planning an international architecture competition for new lightweight structures similar to the master’s.
