Prefabricated steel buildings by Jean Prouvé are fairly well known but, as Stéphane Berthier of the Ecole Nationale d'Architecture points out in the latest Journal of Construction History, in a large number of his buildings timber played a significant role as constructional elements.
 
Her paper looks at a selection of his timber buildings made from the 1940s to the 1960s and shows that Prouvé's work was ahead of the subsequent pioneers of French wooden architecture - Gimonet, Lajus, Schweitzer and Watel - in his use of timber as an industrial material.
 
One of his seminal timber works were the BCC Pavilions, family homes which were designed in collaboration with Le Corbusier's cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, in 1941-42 when timber had to be used because of steel shortages. Berthier explains how timber elements were fabricated to respect the theory of equal resistance which Prouvé had developed for his earlier steel structures.
 
Prouvé started by making wrought iron fittings for buildings, went on to fabricate steel furniture, and became a self-educated architect and engineer. He was outside the mainstream in French architecture, struggled to gain commissions, and lost control of the factory he set up to produce prefabricated buildings, although the modern interest in his work is such that original modest small buildings are now worth millions.
 
Stephane Berthier concludes that in times of 'symbolic ecology or greenwashing this leads us to review again the lessons to be found in the work of Jean Prouvé'.