01-08-2025
In a Spanish Vineyard, an Unsung Engineer Finally Gets a Toast
The long, butter-colored building with green stripes lies low in a Spanish vineyard like a steel caterpillar. It is a rare species — believed to be the only prefabricated metal house of its type in Europe by a prolific yet little remembered French engineer named Ferdinand Fillod.
The building, the Tropical Pavilion, a 969-square-foot steel structure dating to 1951, will be on view through September at Terra Remota, a winery in northeastern Spain. After that, architecture buffs can travel to Vietnam, Martinique or Réunion Island, east of Madagascar, if they want to see another example.
Or they can buy this one. The price is 900,000 euros (about $1.06 million).
Born in 1891, Fillod began his career manufacturing steel agricultural equipment, including boilers, manure tanks and storage sheds. With the increased demand for housing in interwar France, he developed ideas for affordable dwellings made of metal. He filed his first architectural patent in the late 1920s, several years before similar experiments by his better-known countryman Jean Prouvé, as historians have pointed out.
The pavilion in Spain, which includes a 323-square-foot terrace, went on display in June after a restoration by its owner, Clément Cividino, the founder of a modern design gallery in nearby Perpignan, France.
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