In 1949 the French minister Eugène Claudius Petit visited Jean Prouvé’s workshops in Maxeville. Then, the Department of Reconstruction and Urbanism (M.R.U.) entrusted Prouvé with the planning and development of light construction houses for series production, which price did not have to overcome the price of a simple house of the outskirts built in the traditional way. The Ministry promised to buy 25 houses of this type and tried to demonstrate that light construction could be a fast and economic procedure to finish the shortage of housings in the postwar period. Finally, only 14 of these houses were built in Meudon, in the outskirts of Paris. His innovative project, and the commitment and dedication of his author, turned them into a model of prefabrication applied to the design and into real works of art that today still can be admired.
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