In 1939, General Dumontier of the Fifth Army commissioned Jean Prouvé to build 300 small structures designed to shelter between four and 12 men. Adapting an existing system of an external load-bearing structure developed for a leisure project, Ateliers Jean Prouvé produced a few hundred units that could be apposed, whose external frame in folded sheet aluminum could be erected and demounted quickly by just two men.
In extreme wartime conditions, Jean Prouvé demonstrated his ability to design a prefabricated construction, and his workshops – despite being diminished by the mobilization of many of its workmen – to produce very quickly.
