Standard
Jean Prouvé, 1934/1950

Chairs take the most stress on their back legs, where they bear the weight of the user's upper body. The engineer, architect and designer Jean Prouvé incorporated this simple insight in his design for the Standard Chair: while steel tubing suffices for the front legs, since they are subject to less stress, the back legs are made of voluminous hollow sections that transfer the primary weight to the floor.

Standard is available in the classic version with seat and backrest in wood or as the Standard SP model with seat and backrest in robust plastic.

Jean Prouvé

(8 April 1901 – 23 March 1984) was a French metal worker, self-taught architect and designer. He is also designated as "constructor". His main achievement was transferring manufacturing technology from industry to architecture, without losing aesthetic qualities. His design skills were not limited to one discipline. During his career Jean Prouvé was involved in architectural design, industrial design, structural design and furniture design.

Jean Prouvé, regarded himself as an engineer throughout his lifetime, was both the designer and manufacturer of his product ideas. His unique oeuvre, ranging from a letter opener to door and window fittings, from lighting and furniture to prefabricated houses and modular building systems, encompasses almost anything that is suited to industrial production and construction.

Jean Prouvé completed his training as a metal artisan before opening his own workshop in Nancy in 1924. In the following years he created numerous furniture designs, and in 1947 Prouvé established his own factory. Due to disagreements with the majority shareholders, he left the company in 1953. During the ensuing decades, Prouvé served as a consulting engineer on a number of important architectural projects in Paris. 

He left his mark on architectural history again in 1971, when he played a major role in selecting the design of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers for the Centre Pompidou as chairman of the competition jury. Prouvé's work encompasses a wide range of objects, from a letter opener to door and window fittings, from lighting and furniture to façade elements and prefabricated houses, from modular building systems to large exhibition structures – essentially, almost anything that is suited to industrial production methods.

In close cooperation with the Prouvé family, Vitra began in 2002 to issue re-editions of designs by this great French constructeur.

Revisiting the rich archives of Jean Prouvé
His daughter Catherine takes us on a stroll down memory lane.

“My father loved to balance on the back legs of his chair,” recalls Catherine Prouvé of her father, Jean. “That’s the position he took to ponder over new inventions and design solutions,” she says. “He was the only one who managed to stay perfectly still on just two legs.”

This daughter’s memory offers us a clue as to why two legs of Jean Prouvé’s best known chair, the Standard, are typically conic. Unlike the thin pin-like legs in this chair’s front, the pair in the back slim down towards the floor. Made from folded sheet metal, they are sturdy yet light-weight. But perhaps just as important is the way they lend themselves to more playful uses than just plain sitting.

Jean Prouvé is generally described as one of the greatest French designers of the 20th century. He was a prolific inventor, a passionate teacher and engineer, an architect, a hands-on workman and a visionary manufacturer. His great enthusiasm for construction was catholic in its reach, including large-scale industrial machines, the inside of photo cameras or the logics of Bach, which he couldn’t resist listening to at highest volume. He was a pilot of airplanes as well as automobiles, whose engines he could spend hours tinkering with. He liked his cars fast and his convertible tops down: “He didn’t even put the top up when it started to rain,” according to his daughter. “He made us kids believe that if he went fast enough, the rain would just shoot over our heads.”

Colour options
The Standard is available in any of the following seat and frame combinations