Early "Chaise en Bois" by Jean Prouve

Prouve's "Chaise en Bois" was an all-wood version of his famous steel "Standard Chair". Because the exigencies of world war made supplies of steel unobtainable in 1942, Prouve redesigned the chair to use as little metal as possible (the eight screws are the only parts fashioned from strategically precious material).



The switch from steel to wood gave Prouve an opportunity to experiment with traditional furniture-making methods that were paradoxically new to him, the machine-age avant-garde. Lovely through-tenons conspicuously join the wooden elements in four places. Though consistent with the modernist ethic of structural honesty, such labor-intensive joinery links Prouve to the craftsmen of an older era, that of his father Victor Prouve.



While made of wood (in this case beech), this war-time iteration of the "Chaise Standard" retains Prouve's signature rear leg that emphatically expresses the structural loads of the chair. Thus the distinctive profile, no less confidently architectural than the pilotis of a Le Corbusier building.



(We have another "Chaise en Bois" in stock, a slightly later example in oak, also a fine example of the type.)