Jean Prouvé’s Sun Shutter stands as a testament to the designer’s career-long pursuit of creating efficient, adaptable design that could reach the widest possible audience. In the 1940s and 1950s, as Prouvé sought to extend his experimentation with mass-produced climate-adaptable design in tropical locations, he designed the present lot for the regional office of the Union Aéromaritime de Transport in Conakry, Guinea. While many of Prouvé’s similar sun shutter units were designed to be added to pre-existing constructions, the present lot was ideated alongside the architects of the building, becoming a central feature of its façade and serving as much as a functional unit as it was an emphatic design statement, cladding the concrete building in rows of shimmering aluminum.

The shutter’s aluminum directional panels were designed to facilitate a kind of natural ventilation in the rooms, filtering light while giving users control over each panel’s orientation. The panel second from the shutter’s top is larger than the three others, functioning as a window when adjusted to open up the user’s room to the landscape around. Now as sculptural as it was originally functional, the sun shutter captures a key period in Prouvé’s constant experimentation with façade panels and what he termed the “curtain wall,” which can also be seen in the “Hublots” Door Panel in the collection of Tamotsu Yagi.