Welcome home ... La Maison Tropicale outside Tate Modern. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
This week in Gateshead, Ikea unveiled the show flat for BokLok, their low-cost "flat-pack" housing concept (it's not really flat-pack, just prefabricated, but hey, it's Ikea!). Outside London's Tate Modern, meanwhile, you can see a prefab house that was made much earlier. This is the Maison Tropicale, a beautiful modernist artefact designed in 1951 by multi-talented Frenchman Jean Prouvé. It's temporarily on display in conjunction with the Design Museum's exhibition on Prouvé, and this could well be the only chance you'll ever get to see it.
The Masion Tropicale really was a flat-pack house, and it was way ahead of its time - not for nothing has Prouvé been labelled "the godfather of high tech" (he was also on the judging panel for the Pompidou Centre). It was designed to be flown out to remote parts of Africa in cargo planes, to house French colonials - not the most politically noble of intentions, perhaps - so it is made entirely of flat, lightweight aluminium and steel pieces. The house is also ahead of its time in terms of eco-design. Built for tropical temperatures, it features an ingenious natural ventilation system - using heat on the roof of the house to draw in fresh air through openings in the walls and up into the ceiling. There are also adjustable sunshades around the veranda, double-skinned insulated walls and sliding doors with lovely little circular portholes of blue glass.
Only three of these houses were made, and they stood forgotten and neglected in Niger and Congo since the 50s until a man called Eric Touchaleaume went over there, bought them, shipped them back and got them restored. This one was torn, smashed, corroded and riddled with bullet holes when he found it, having survived Congo's numerous civil wars (you can still see a bullet hole in the railings).
In commercial terms, the Maison Tropicale was a failure - it was too expensive and complicated to manufacture. But really, it's a work of art. It's an architectural milestone, and a gorgeous piece of retro design that's somehow classically French. I can just imagine Tintin parking a 2CV outside it, or a sweaty Jean-Paul Belmondo pouring Catherine Deneuve a pastis on the verandah while cursing the tropical heat. It might look a little out of place in chilly London, but for design fans, it's well worth a visit.
