Home » News » Moulins-les-Metz. Do you know what Jean Prouvé created in Moulins-lès-Metz?

Moulins-les-Metz. Do you know what Jean Prouvé created in Moulins-lès-Metz?

It was at a time when gasoline was not yet a luxury product. We are not even in 1973, the year of the first oil shock. Made famous by his chairs and other furniture selling for exorbitant prices today, Jean Prouvé was approached by the Total group (which became TotalEnergies last year) to design… his next service stations! We are then at the end of the 1960s.

The energy group is indeed looking for a renowned designer, better known for his works of art than for his achievements in the industrial world, because its leaders want buildings that are… modular and transportable! “These service stations had to be able to be moved because at the end of the 1960s, we did not really know what the traffic on the roads was going to be”, confided in our columns Catherine Coley, art historian and specialist in Jean Proved.

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Aesthetic and functional

The brilliant, self-taught creator was therefore chosen by Total to be in charge of these new kinds of “Legos”. Jean Prouvé will not be the victim of a stroke of the pump. Under his pencil strokes (but also with the help of Serge Binotto, one of his collaborators who will inspire him), a hundred stations will emerge from the ground in the early 1970s, particularly in Lorraine. Fontoy, Messein (Meurthe-et-Moselle) but also a town in the Messina region: Moulins-lès-Metz. The station will be on the road to Ars-sur-Moselle.

At the time, the building did not go unnoticed. Cylindrical, the structure unfolds around a central shaft. It is made up of sheet metal plates and 13 glass and polyester panels. Fully functional work of art and installation: for thirty years, the station will fully play its role.

A building that survived

But everything that has a beginning has an end. In Moulins-lès-Metz and elsewhere, the prefabs stop turning. In both senses of the word. The creations of Jean Prouvé, which he considered to be living works like all his other creations, are slowly dying out. The once temporary construction of “Moulins”… will not move. A listed monument, the defunct station will be delivered to Mother Nature but also to squatters: won over by vegetation, the places will be tagged, vandalized, stripped (everything that could be stolen has been).

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The building, which ended up filling the environment, will nevertheless be extracted from its siding. The premises are now occupied by a used car dealer. And to feed the time machine, we can add that other similar stations have been dismantled to find a second life elsewhere, in another form (in the metaphorical sense). The one formerly installed in Messein was sold for €48,000 to a private party. The principle of mobility, which was the central point of Jean Prouvé’s work, finally allowed his service stations to survive…

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