The Jean Prouvé exhibition ends on April 13. There’s just one week left to go and see this excellent collection of the French designer and manufacturer’s work at the Design Museum, by Tower Bridge in London. The Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition is also running, upstairs, and you can catch it until 27 April.

The Prouvé exhibition is laid out as a sequence of explorations into different aspects of his work. From the first exhibit, Prouvé is depicted here as a mature designer with a ready-established aesthetic and expertise.

Prouvé’s work is significant for succeeding generations of furniture designers and architects. Like Alvar Aalto (well presented by Shigeru Ban in last year’s Barbican exhibition) he offered his clients a combination of true craftsmanship, innovation and a vision that went beyond the bounds of the briefs he was set.

His output (roughly from 1923 to 1952) peaked at a happy moment for a designer. The arrival of new materials in the thirties and forties created the opportunity to develop new manufacturing techniques. This coincided with a genuine public interest and industrial investment in the potential of new objects to build a new world. There are echoes of those times in our own.

Prouvé’s approach was serious and methodical yet the products most commonly associated with his work have a lightness and jocular poise, to my eyes, which compliment his commitment to collaborating with artists and developing a distinctive design philosophy. But if you don’t like sheet metal, you won’t have much fun here.

The Guardian newspaper has reviewed the exhibition. Stephen Bayley draws a contrast between Prouvé’s authentic design credentials and what he thinks, without naming names, is ‘that conga-line of annoying look-at-me artistes that comprises the bulk of today’s design profession.’ Ouch.