UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
Date: August 20, 2004
I, Andrew Schilling, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Master of Science in: Architecture It is entitled: Hinged Things: Concerning the Interior(s) of Eileen Gray
This work and its defense approved by:
Chair: Patrick Snadon John Hancock James Bradford HINGED THINGS: CONCERNING THE INTERIOR(S) OF EILEEN GRAY
A Thesis Submitted to the
Division of Research and Advanced Studies Of the University of Cincinnati
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF SCIENCE
in the Department of Architecture of the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning
2004
by
Andrew Schilling
B.S. Architecture, Pennsylvania State University, 1994 B. Arch., Pennsylvania State University, 1995
Committee: Patrick Snadon John Hancock James Bradford HINGED THINGS: CONCERNING THE INTERIOR(S) OF EILEEN GRAY
Abstract
Eileen Gray built few buildings yet numerous critics drew her work into their concerns.
She witnessed this and when, near the end of her life, her work again caught public attention, she burned many of her private papers. Her career bears the imprint of this manner of avoidance. The aim of this thesis is to re-interpret her life and her work, unfolding issues that unify the concerns of both.
Chapter One reviews existing scholarship on Eileen Gray including prominent contributions from Carolyn Constant, Joseph Rykwert, Beatriz Colomina and others. Several of these authors contrast Gray to Le Corbusier and Adolph Loos.
Chapter Two examines Gray’s houses designed for herself and their significance as hinge points in her life. The circumstances wherein she abandoned them and created new ones, fit into a larger pattern of relationships and retreats, and of her own identity creation. Her history with her father, with Paris and London, and with her lovers, figures significantly in her life of retreats.
Chapter Three investigates Gray’s use of language which, typically overlooked or dismissed, reveals her concern with her own life. The witty and hermetic names she chose for her houses and for her furniture, as well as the peculiar passages she inscribed on walls, reveal both
Gray’s work and her relationship to the world as a game of hiding.
Chapter four examines Gray’s use of the hinge—an idea she developed from the mid-
1910’s to the end of her career. She applied hinges at various scales, sometimes literally, sometimes merely in allusion. With hinges she invoked closets and hiding, human touch as manipulation, and bodily mass and movement.
Ultimately, the privacy, functionality, and practicality evident in her work derived from more emotional concerns—the individualistic and privacy seeking drives of her psyche.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to a number of people for this work. I thank my advisor, Patrick Snadon for his rigorous criticism and thoughtful guidance as well as for initiating the topic. I thank John
Hancock for his invaluable comments and his constant encouragement. I am grateful to Jim
Bradford for his lectures on philosophy that will affect any work I take up in my life. My gratitude also goes to Aarati Kanekar, Eric Inglert, and William Taylor for numerous discussions on thinking, this work and the work of our students.
Friends, colleagues and students have contributed to the development of my ideas, through conversations, class discussions and their own research works. Particular thanks are due to Jaideep Chatterjee, Sudipto Ghosh, Lejla Vujicic, and Ellen Guerrettaz. I thank Rachel
Martinez, and Heidi Bertman, my editors, for their careful review. I also thank Carrie, my wife, for her enthusiasm and unwavering encouragement.
I am grateful to the University of Cincinnati for an excellent program, for an encouraging and supportive environment and for so many tangential opportunities. Finally, I thank the
George Fabe Scholarship Fund for financial resources allowing me to extend my research and round out this work.
Andrew Schilling Portland, Oregon 2004 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………... 2
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………… 3
Chapters
1.0 Literature Review………………………………………………………………..… 11
1.1 1920’ + 30’s: De Stijl, Wendigen and L’Architecture Vivante 11
1.2 1969-79: Late Recognition 14
1.3 1979-87: Biography 18
1.4 1980’s: Re-evaluating Modernism 21
1.5 1990’s: Incorporating Biography 26
2.0 Situating Her/Self: the Significance of Gray’s Dwellings…………………… 40
2.1 Complicated Interiors: Exteriority and the Childhood Home(s) 42
2.2 The First House and Jean Desert 51
2.3 E.1027 52
2.4 Tempe à Pailla 54
2.5 Lou Peru and the Notebooks 58
1 3.0 Naming, Wit and other Non Sense……………….…………………………… 59
3.1 Naming E.1027 and Tempe à Pailla 61
3.2 Furniture, Rugs, and other things 65
3.3 The Transat Chair and Breuer’s B-3 Chair 68
3.4 Time to Drink: Passages at E.1027 74
3.5 The Decorative Art of Today 75
3.6 Passages at E.1027 78
3.7 Le Corbusier: the-rapist 83
4.0 The Screen and the Hinge: Hiding and the Character(s) of Control…….. 87
4.1 From Panels to Screens 90
4.2 Entries and Vistas 94
4.3 Passages and Turns 102
4.4 Things in Their Place 106
4.5 At Arm’s Length 109
Illustration Credits……………………………………………………………………… 113
Selected Bibliography……...…………………………………………….……………… 116
2 Introduction
Introduction
In some ways, Eileen Gray’s story has only recently been discovered. She began her creative career nearly a century ago and though she remained active until her death in 1978, she was virtually ignored for almost her entire creative life. In the last ten years of her life she saw some of her work, drawings of projects thirty years old, gain in popularity and fetch remarkable sums at auction. Since then, scholarship on her career has grown slowly with a significant reappraisal each decade. In this sense, her work has been tilled several times. Her oeuvre invites
“tilling” because simplistic, diagrammatic distinctions are not easily maintained and she strove to intensify that condition. Her furniture, rugs, interiors and architecture, appear at once with clarity and with an unsettled complexity. This condition reflects her knack for finding and exposing cracks in an aesthetic ethical idea, especially the Modernism of the 1920’s and 30’s, without setting another complete and stable idea in its place. Gray’s work works to unsettle.
3 Introduction
Fig. —1. Eileen Gray portrait by Bernice Abbott, 1926.
4 Introduction
If Eileen Gray has only recently been discovered, it is because she has always been a problematic subject for architectural interpretation. This is due in part to her personality, to the friends she maintained and others she came to know, to her life philosophy, and to the critical program she espoused in her work. These four circumstances succeeded in keeping Gray at the fringe of architectural discourse only because that was where she was most comfortable.
Ironically, her recent “discovery” is owing to her position on the fringe as recent critical theory has turned its eye to the forgotten corners of modern design in search of what has been missed by the tidy structures of the past.
Gray was exceedingly shy and did little to promote her own legacy. In fact, as the current thesis proposes, she acted to obscure it. She chose to work at home in her apartment or house, wherever she might be, rather than take a public atelier or join other students at the studio. Almost all of her creations were for her own use. The few pieces she executed for clients were custom items that could not possibly have reached a broad market.
Among vocal contemporaries such as Jean Badovici, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Jan
Wils, she was not to be easily heard so she was often in their shadow. Gray didn’t devote time to a prolonged public discourse about aesthetics and ethics because she had her own preoccupations, her own desires, that didn’t rely on professional fulfillment or recognition. In fact, recognition would have made living her private life more cumbersome. Still, it seems that
5 Introduction
there was always someone at hand to prod her along in her ‘career’ or to take up her cause.
One such individual was Jean Badovici, the editor of the Modernist journal,
“L’Architecture Vivante.” Through her relationship with Badovici, Gray gained exposure to the architecture of her Modernist contemporaries. In fact, she maintained a distant relationship with the avant-garde of her day. She eschewed the essentially formal, systemic and monological nature of Le Corbusier’s work, even as Badovici pushed her to work with Le Corbusier’s lexicon of five points. Gray’s contemporaries attempted to include her work under the canon of
“Modern Architecture” though they never managed to do so in any natural or comfortable manner.
Gray remained an elusive, mysterious and marginal figure in architectural history and in many ways still is today. Her prominent affiliates were many and presumably their influence was great. She corresponded with Jan Wills and J.J.P. Oud in the early 1920’s. Her close friendship with Jean Badovici lasted over a decade and through him she met Le Corbusier and
Pierre Chareau and was introduced to the work of Adolf Loos and other notable Modernists.
Critics have pointed out the significant influence that each of these men had on her work. No doubt Gray was willing to take up design problems as presented by the modern world and similarly addressed by others of her time. These men cast long shadows that Gray could hardly avoid. The question for most critics has not been whether she resided in their shadows but which
6 Introduction
shadow she called home and how she synthesized these diverse influences into a single significant conceptual structure.
This thesis proposes that interpretive exercises, when addressing Gray’s work, face difficulties of scale. Recent critics have applied vast aesthetic agendas to her work in addition to far-reaching notions of professional development, and social and political activism, among others. These sweeping concepts grow out of a fundamental assumption about the role of the architect in society, the public servant seeking to better the world for mankind. Such concepts act as another kind of shadow for interpretation because Gray’s work thrusts in the opposite direction. She was an individual dilettante who sought a private ground plan in an increasingly public world. Finding a core concept for Gray’s work, a center, has been difficult because she is its centerher private life. The current project resists the flight to broad macro-concepts through a series of thematic interpretive exercises. Each exercise foregrounds a few patterns evident in her life and work. Critics have ignored the patterns chosen here because they are difficult to resolve with the interpretive structures at hand, have remained beyond the horizon of critical concern, and appear to be merely idiosyncratic. The first theme involves the places Gray settled.
She repeatedly relocated in order to avoid relationships and re-establish a jealously guarded private life. The second theme is the names Gray chose for her designs. These were often witty, ironic and private in meaning and as such, should be seen as intensely significant. The third
7 Introduction
theme unfolds the screen and the hinge. She created screens in numerous manifestations: as stand-alones, as wall treatments, and as integral architectural elements. The hinge first appeared in Gray’s screens but later re-appeared more frequently than the screens themselves. Both the screen and the hinge evolve throughout her work with all their mutual connotations intact.
Chapter One examines the history of Gray’s treatment at the hands of critics through the
20th century. Gray’s peers recognized her dwellings of the 1920’s and 30’s for their integrity, skill and energy. She had developed a name for herself. However, by the outbreak of World War II, she was largely forgotten. This seemed to suit her private nature. The history of the discourse shows a pattern of forgetfulness, dormancy and reawakening. Such reappraisal and appropriation is common to any ongoing discourse but seems especially so with this history. The work of various scholars is shown to be inclusive, attempting to ally Gray with virtually every aesthetic movement in the early 20th century. The authors attempt to reduce Gray’s life and work to a fundamental set of issues that continue throughout. This is problematic because her work, the more we examine it, defies the conventional structure of our most common continuities.
Chapter two addresses those places that Eileen Gray created for herself—the dwellings wherein she built a life of work and play—and their significance as hinge pins in her life. The circumstances under which she made her moves, the personal relationships made and broken through those moves, and certain characteristics of the locales, present a meaningful pattern. The
8 Introduction
moves were hinges of sorts, through which Gray settled into a private realm of momentary focusa clear understanding of her creative world under the sun, overlooking the sea. The relocations allowed her to clearly discern the public place recently departed from the private one newly created. Once there, having newly re-established control over her daily life, she would set about working her various arts. The results were objects of Gray’s daily use that invited manipulation and multiple uses. They could be easily controlled and adapted to various settings.
Inevitably public life found her again and she folded visitors into the plans for those houses. She held them at bay through spatial manipulation and other devices until another departure became eminent. Gray’s life was a search for a place to stay, an interior where she could find peace and nurture her own sense of self-identity.
Chapter three unfolds the relevance of naming and wit in Gray’s work. The names she chose for her works were often peculiar, seemingly random, or obviously private. The chapter opens the issue by examining the names of her houses, E.1027 and Tempe à Pailla. Gray’s fascination with naming had appeared early in her lacquer work, her furniture and other creative endeavors. By the late 1920’s, naming took on intense significance and can be seen to counter the acute pragmatism so revered by her contemporaries. This is especially true for the furniture and interiors she designed for E.1027 and Tempe à Pailla. She named pieces of that period to deliberately erect a screen of privacy that drew inevitable questions, which in turn, led to a more
9 Introduction
intimate unveiling.
Chapter four examines Gray’s use of the hinge—an idea she developed with increasing creativity from the mid-1910’s to the end of her career. At first, the hinge appears in the folded planes of lacquer screens within some of her early interior projects as ways of dividing space.
The hinge makes explicit certain connotations of the screen such as its role in hiding, revealing and situating. This was possible in part because of certain affinities between the screen and the hinge, especially their binomial structure, the way they allude to or implicate the human figure in their composition, and their mutual reference to structures such as doors, closets and entryways.
The hinge establishes two united sides that are attached, but whose relationship changes through use. Gray applied hinges at various scales, revealing them literally at times, merely alluding to them at others. The hinge makes reference to closets and hiding, to human touching through manipulation, and to bodily movement.
10 Chapter 1
1.0 Literature Review
1.1 1920’s + 30’s: De Stijl, Wendigen and L’Architecture Vivante
Eileen Gray’s reception among her Modernist contemporaries was enthusiastic. Her early lacquer work and screens had already drawn recognition from Vogue in August 1917 and
Harper’s Bazaar in September 1920. Her later furniture of the mid 1920’s was admired by many, including Pierre Chareau and Le Corbusier as well as Jan Wils and the De Stijl artists. Her friendship with Jean Badovici, having grown out of their independent contributions to a publication of Wendigen, led her to new exercises in architecture and the completion of E.1027.
Le Corbusier was a friend of Jean Badovici’s and he and his wife, Yvonne, stayed at
E.1027 on several occasions. Gray’s history with Le Corbusier began well. He wrote to her of his admiration for E.1027 and its incorporated furnishings but it is unclear how much time the two ever spent together. Repeatedly their correspondence refers to near misses and unrealized anticipation.
During this period, Gray wrote about the theoretical concerns that drove her furniture and architectural design. Badovici was the editor of the journal L’Architecture Vivante and the two worked together on a series of dialogues that aired her criticism of “Modern Architecture” and her thoughts on design ethics. In the 1924 winter edition of L’Architecture Vivante, Badivici
11 Chapter 1
introduced a few of Gray’s furniture designs.1 A single page of the 1926 winter edition presented the apartment which she designed for Badovici in Paris.2 Finally, in 1929, the entire winter edition was dedicated to photographs and a description of E.1027. It included “From Eclecticism to Doubt,” an elaborate dialogue between Badovici and Gray as interviewer and interviewee.3 In these articles, Gray was openly critical of Modern Architecture; of what she saw as a naive formalism that failed to address the concerns of life. Through these articles Gray addressed many of the ideas Le Corbusier put forth in The Decorative Art of Today, a series of essays he published in the early 1920’s and gathered into a book in 1925.4 The results of the dialogues leave far more questions than hard answers, allowing a wide field for the speculation of later scholars.
As shown in Chapter 3 of the present work, the posing of questions rather than answers was central to Gray’s critical program.
Gray’s friendship with Le Corbusier grew tortured. In 1935 Le Corbusier painted several murals on the walls of E.1027 without Gray’s permission. Gray interpreted this as an effacement of her work and, because her sexuality was the subject of one mural, as a personal affront to her
1 Jean Badovici, “Eileen Gray,” L’Architecture Vivante, Winter, (1924):27- 28,[36]. 2 Eileen Gray, “Interieur à Paris, 1924,” L’Architecture Vivante Winter (1926):l32. 3 Jean Badovici and Eileen Gray “Maison en Bord de Mer,” Architecture Vivante Winter(1929).
12 Chapter 1
privacy. Later, publishing those murals in his own memoirs, Le Corbusier failed to attribute
E.1027 to Gray and scholars assumed him to be its architect. The building’s authorship became even less clear through time. E.1027 was attributed to Badovici after his death in 1958.
Acknowledgements were made to Gray for the furniture and built-ins.
Peter Adam was able to recount Gray’s exchange with Le Corbusier in his biography because of the friendship he developed with Gray late in her life.5 Adam tells us she was frustrated and hurt by these events and, as was her nature, she withdrew from public debate.
With her most significant architectural work attributed to others and no voice to maintain the debate, she was entirely forgotten by mid-century.
Shortly before her death in 1978, her work again drew critical interest. Joseph Rykwert reviewed her architectural works in three separate articles from 1968 to 19726,7,8 A show of her life work was organized at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1979 providing the material for a
4 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, translated by D. F. Krell (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987). 5 Peter Adam, Eileen Gray, architect/designer, (New York: H.N.: Abrams, 1987). 6 Joseph Rykwert, "Un Omaggio a Eileen Gray: Pionera Del Design," Domus, no. 469 (1968): 29-31. 7 Rykwert, "Eileen Gray: Two Houses and an Interior, 1926-1933." Perspecta 13/14, (1971): 66-73. 8 Rykwert, "Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design." Architectural Review 152, no. 910 (1972): 359-60.
13 Chapter 1
book by J. Stewart Johnson.9 The recognition set off a series of articles and other critics followed in the 1980’s. In the 1990’s, with the growth of feminist discourse on architecture, her work generated increasing interest. Her story took on special significance as a woman in early modern design.
This chapter discusses the various conversations that have developed around Gray’s work. The history of that discourse shows a pattern of forgetfulness, dormancy and reawakening as each group of new critics drew her work into their concerns. Such appropriation and reappraisal is common to any ongoing discourse but seems particularly appropriate with Gray’s history. When her work began to draw the attention of the design world in the mid-1970’s she burned many of her private papers. One wonders if she anticipated the throes of critical discussion, knew she could do nothing about it, and wished to remove herself and her career from it. Peter Adam notes in the introduction to his biography that Gray was unaware of the project he had in mind and admits that she would not have approved.
1.2 1969 + 1979: Late Recognition
Shortly before her death in 1978, as Gray’s late re-emergence was well underway, an
9 J. S. Johnson, Eileen Gray, Designer. (New York: Debrett’s Peerage for Museum
14 Chapter 1
original adjustable table was purchased at auction from Sothebys for nearly $30,000. This turn of events was only possible as a result of Joseph Rykwert’s three articles of almost a decade before10 and the exhibition underway by J. Stewart Johnson.
Rykwert stated his goal at the onset, to “set her among the masters of Modern
Architecture.” To do so, he discusses E.1027, Tempe à Pailla and the Badovici apartment Gray completed in 1929. Rykwert had little doubt about the value of these works for “Modern
Architecture.” He felt that Gray’s work exhibited a very sophisticated understanding of the language of “Modern Architecture” and was of a very high and consistent quality.
Of greater concern, as Rykwert noted, was the issue of quantity. Eileen Gray completed very few architectural works. Rykwert didn’t explain the issue further but the concern was simple: mastery is established through a body of work that exhibits a continuity of thoughtful consideration and an evolution of ideas. By comparison to the productive careers of Adolph
Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, two houses and several interiors seems very inconsequential. Le Corbusier and the others wrote about their own work and promoted it and
Modernism in general. They were very active in the discourse of “Modern Architecture” while
of Modern Art, 1980) 10 See notes 8, 9, and 10 above.
15 Chapter 1
Gray, with just a few articles written in the third person, did not engage in such an aggressive discourse.
Rykwert trusted those few examples of Gray’s work because of their consistency, and because of the evolution and refinement they display. He compared her career to that of Pierre
Chareau whose “quality work” coincided with his collaboration with B. Bijvoet in the 1930’s.
Before and after that collaboration, Chareau’s work was not of the same “quality.” Gray’s work spanned a period before and after her collaboration with Jean Badovici. As Rykwert stated, her work “had from the outset been lighter and more accomplished than Chareau’s and simply took a decisive turn after 1925: it continued to develop, and to grow in assurance.”
Most of Rykwert’s article is taken up with formal analysis of the three designs primarily by description of their organization. Rykwert especially noted the correlation between the detailing, the furnishings and the overall order of the spaces. He was most impressed with the way that smaller elements—screens, louvers, furniture pieces, canopies, and shutters—helped distinguish one space from the next while permitting visual continuity. Rykwert appreciated this layering insofar as it added a kind of complex clarity to the layout, what he termed “visual ambience.”
Gray spent much of the last 15 years of her life gathering and revisiting and reworking
16 Chapter 1
her oeuvre in several small notebooks. Johnson’s Eileen Gray: Designer, published in 1980, presented many of those materials for the first time. This small book included many of Gray’s lacquer screens, chairs, tables, lamps, rugs, posters and advertisements for her designs, and a few images of her architectural works. Johnson gave a brief outline of her career, focusing mostly on the decorative arts, especially the lacquer work. Most of the book is given over to imagery with some supporting commentary and finally, some of the memorabilia Gray compiled at the end of her life.
Johnson’s and Rykwert’s projects were similarly limited in scope. Rykwert’s stated goal, and the one discernible in Johnson’s book, to bring Eileen Gray the recognition she deserved, laudable and effective as it may have been, set strict limitations on the scope of both discussions.
The brevity and gestural quality of these pieces should not be surprising. Thirty years had passed since any scholarship addressed her work and these constituted the first steps back into a forgotten history. These scholars counted themselves as friends and admirers of Eileen Gray and sensed the need for belated recognition—both overdue and posthumous.
The authors pointed out the efficacy of certain techniques apparent in Gray’s works. For
Rykwert, the projects ingeniously built upon the language of Modern Architecture and for
Johnson, the furniture exhibited a rich understanding of the combination of materials. Neither author directly addressed any sophisticated notion of meaning in the works, either relative to
17 Chapter 1
broader design contexts or as to how Gray’s work might have pertained to her own design philosophy. None the less, notions apparent in each work found their way into later scholarship, much larger in scope, more candid in tone and ultimately more convincing and productive.
Rykwert’s linkage of visual ambience to formal strategies is recognizable in John Paul Rayon’s work of 1989, “The North Star and the South Star.” Whereas Rykwert makes vague reference to
“a radically different life-style,” Jean Paul Rayon’s noted Gray’s adaptation of De Stijl notions, linking the “choreographic dynamic of the whole” with the “theatricality of life.”11 Likewise,
Johnson’s concern for material and surface grows into a palpable concern for skin in Yehuda
Safran’s la Pelle of 1989.12
1.3 1979-87: a Biography
When Peter Adam first published his biography, Eileen Gray, Architect/Designer in
1987, scholarship on Gray was still superficial; there was little known about her life. Adam unfolded Gray’s story, thus providing material for the more nuanced scholarship that followed.
Much of what we know about her life is due to the efforts he put forth during her waning years.
11 Jean Paul Rayon, “The North Star and the South Star,” in 9H: on Rigor, edited by R. Burdett & W. Wang (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989), 164-87. 12 Yehuda Safran, “La Pelle,” in 9H: on Rigor, edited by R. Burdett and W. Wang (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989), 155-63.
18 Chapter 1
Eileen Gray grew up a wealthy girl in Ireland. Her life there was comfortable and she was well educated. Once she obtained permission from her mother, she left Ireland for Paris, but not to escape her seemingly isolated youth. Rather, this is the first of many moves that Eileen would make in order to avoid various entangling relationships: social, political and professional in nature. Though she had numerous close friendships throughout her life, she repeatedly reverted to life as a loner. Gray typically kept her contemporaries at arm’s length and one senses that she was not entirely uncomfortable with her relative obscurity in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s.
The concern in Adam’s account was to establish that Gray’s preference for solitude arose not from weakness but from strength. Chapter 2 of the current work further argues that the issue of solitude, the places of her retreat and the work she executed in those places present a fabric of intense meaning central to Gray’s critical project.
At the same time she was entertaining Joseph Rykwert, J. Stewart Johnson and Peter
Adam she burned her private documents, photos, and certain drawings. To these men she laid out her final thoughts on her own life and work. The coincidence of these two postures—one of erasure and the other of unfolding—is significant. Gray seemed to reveal her life with one hand and conceal it with the other. On closer inspection of Adam’s biography, the effort seems less an isolated act than a lifelong habit. Her dialogues allude to this complicated and contradictory condition of life—her life—and profess her desire to work its tapestry of meaning.
19 Chapter 1
Despite the breadth of Adam’s contribution, he was uncomfortable with interweaving the discussion of Gray’s life with her work. He stated that the two are not necessarily related. A quote from the Foreword to the revised edition seems to underscore the difficulty of Adam’s position:
“While her work is dissected and interpreted, the most interesting thing about Eileen Gray remains her struggle with life, a life that has not ceased to fascinate people of all generations. It is the story of a woman trying to survive. Her real contribution to the architecture of the twentieth century is not in her architecture, but in her refreshing thoughts and her undogmatic approach to the quality of life”13
In this comment Adam appears deliberately to resist a conceptual relationship that he cannot help but nearly voice—the interconnectedness of Gray’s life and work. It would be naive to think Gray was blind to the biography taking shape in Peter Adam’s notes as they met in her apartment. Almost a decade after her death, Eileen Gray’s sly critical program of hiding was naively continued by her biographer.
In the end, much like Rykwert and Johnson, Adam argues that Gray was among the major female artists of the 20th century. Adam’s position hangs less on her technical acuity than
20 Chapter 1
her humane conception of the built world and her resistance of “narrow” Modernist characterizations. The air of resistance likely grows from Gray’s influence because the biography took shape through her narration in the mid 1970’s. Gray had half a century to contemplate
Modern Architecture’s successes and failures and to comfortably frame her contributions to both.
For scholarship on Gray, the biography uncovers an artist addressing the exigencies of life rather than concerning herself with the political posturing of an intellectual elite.
1.4 1980s: Re-evaluating the Modern
By the late 1980s, the re-evaluation of early Modernism had gained great momentum.
The work of Adolph Loos, Marcel Duchamp, Gerrit Rietveld, and Mies van der Rohe were all coming under renewed interpretive scrutiny. This context, along with Adam’s then-recent biography, again fueled interest in Eileen Gray. In 1989, the journal 9H dedicated part of edition
No 8 to emerging scholarship on Gray’s career.14
Rosamund Diamond’s two-page essay, “Eileen Gray: an Introduction”, draws on the
13 Adam, Eileen Gray, Architect/designer, 6. 14 Richard Burdett and Wilfried Wang, editors, 9H: on Rigor Cambridge,
21 Chapter 1
biography Peter Adam had published just two years prior and serves to set the context for the ensuing essays by other authors. The text is a brief summary of Gray’s career that neatly lays out her progression from furniture to interiors and finally to the free-standing architecture that was
“the ultimate way to express her own ethos.”
Several of Diamond’s comments isolate issues that figured strongly in later scholarship.
Most prominent is the reference to famous individuals in the design fields with whom Gray had contact—notables such as Le Corbusier, J.J.P. Oud, Jan Wils, and Jean Badovici. Diamond also noted a few of Gray’s most recognized design traits, including the complete integration of furniture, her concern for materiality and construction, her attention to detail, and her concern for the relation of interior to exterior. While Diamond contributed little new scholarship, she drew a tidy sketch from Adam’s biography.
Second, in his contribution to 9H, Peter Adam briefly revisited Gray’s tortured relationship with Le Corbusier and the contentious happenings at E.1027. He described the painting of the murals as rape. Adam relayed that LeCorbusier’s actions, and also Badovici’s, hurt Gray greatly and furthered her isolation. Adam’s focus on these events foreshadowed the attention they later received at the hands of Beatriz Colomina, Carolyn Constant and others.
22 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989). Chapter 1
Yehuda Safran’s 9H piece, entitled “la pelle,” focuses on Gray’s marginal stature as ex- patriot, female architect and lesbian. Safran correlates Gray’s marginalization with her obsession with skin, surface and transitory elements—the thresholds that stand between being and non- being, what is here and no longer here. Safran compares this dynamic to that of Wittgenstein, whom he described as another disenfranchised individualist.
Finally, and most interestingly, Jean Paul Rayon’s contribution to 9H, “Eileen Gray: The
North Star and the South Star,” (first published in 1985 in the catalogue for the exhibition, De Stijl et l’architecture en France) draws its interpretive concepts from the Dutch journals De Stijl and
Wendigen. The debates in those journals, like any avant-garde discourse in architecture, linked an ethical question—how modern man ought to live—to a novel formal program—abstract geometric expressionism. The De Stijl/Wendigen reliance on formal language as the nexus of meaning is central to Rayon’s discussion.
23 Chapter 1
Rayon’s comparison of Gray’s Table in
Sycamore and Oak (1922-24) to Reitveld’s Berlin
Stool (1923) reveals the sophistication of his formal analysis and betrays the degree to which he relies on that analysis alone to generate structures of meaning. Rayon points out that both compositions use a combination of reductive geometric elements along with a limited palette of Fig. —2. Table in Sycamore and Oak, 1919/25. contrasting colors located to enhance the compositional intensity of the forms. He distinguishes the two pieces according to the way each formulates the relation between abstraction and expression. The hinge pin of the relation is their response to a pragmatic problem: How to address gravity.
Fig. —3. Red/Blue armchair, Gerrit Reitveld, 1918 (after renovation).
24 Chapter 1
Rayon pointed out that the planes and elongated cubes employed by Rietveld appear to slide along each other. A single color is assigned to each shape to further underscore the independence of the pieces. The composition seems only by momentary coincidence to organize itself into what we recognize as a chair and resists any acknowledgement of gravity.
Rayon further explained that, in contrast to Rietveld, Gray’s table used a similar set of elements with the opposite expressive goal in mind. She employed planes that fold over and alongside each other, creating a deliberate connective logic. While her composition is visually dynamic, it appears complete, balanced and situated. In the composition of Gray’s table, Rayon interpreted a deliberate expression of gravity as expressed in its “constructed” logic.
Through the remainder of the essay, Rayon applied these same interpretive structures to
Gray’s architecture. He drew out certain formal motifs including the fold and the bend, sliding things, the relation of opposites, the subsequent inversion of oppositions, and the two-sided-ness of things. Rayon argues that these structures are Gray’s formal logic.
While the strength of Rayon’s contribution lay in foregrounding these formal motifs, the weakness lay in failing to describe their meaning for “the life of modern man.” Accommodating modern man is the overt goal of the De Stijl movement, the Wendigen artists, and most importantly, Eileen Gray. Rayon vaguely cited ‘the complexities of life’ as grounding for her
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work, a phrase that he culled from De Stijl, but with no meaningful reference to the most obvious life in question, Eileen Gray’s. This is especially curious since most scholarship of the 1980s turns on a few poignant episodes in Gray’s life. Rayon’s omission likely resulted from three conditions: First, his work for the original publication of this article predates Peter Adam’s biography. Little was known about Gray’s life and work before Adam. Second, Rayon is expressly concerned with certain De Stijl concepts including total design; thus for Rayon, Gray’s early interest in complete environments makes inevitable her later involvement in architecture.
Allowing that Badovici’s role in Gray’s career was formative rather than convenient would undermine the importance of the continuity Rayon identifies. Finally, he was writing for an art exhibition catalog during the ascendancy of high formalism both in design and criticism.
1.5 1990’s: Incorporating Biography
Beatriz Colomina’s “War on Architecture: E.1027”15 is the first of four articles in which she discusses E.1027. The second, third, and fourth were all entitled Battle Lines: E.1027.16 All
15 Beatriz Colomina, “War on Architecture: E.1027,” Assemblage, no.20, (1993): 28-29. 16 Colomina, “Battle Lines: E.1027,” Center: a Journal for Architecture in America, v.9, (1995): [22]-31. Colomina, “Battle Lines: E.1027,” in The Sex of Architecture, edited by Dianna Agrest, Patricia Conway, & Leslie Kanes Weisman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1996), 167-82. Colomina, “Battle Lines: E.1027,” in The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, ed. F. Hughes (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), 2-25.
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three articles, though subtly different in scope and content, circle around the same events first described by Peter Adam involving Eileen Gray, LeCorbusier, and the murals he painted at
E.1027. However, in all of the articles, Colomina is primarily concerned with Le Corbusier’s involvement.
Colomina’s ‘histories’ of E.1027 foregrounds the obsessive gaze of Le Corbusier.17 In
Colomina’s accounts, he was spying, looking for secrets. He was, as she she quoted him from another context, “entering the house of a stranger.” For Colomina, it was an episode characterized by the fetishistic, the obsessive, the voyeuristic, and the erotic. Colomina describes
Le Corbusier’s drawings and murals as occupations, at times by deceit, of the places and people under his gaze. Her intention was to reveal an unspoken side to Le Corbusier’s productive activities. Colomina likens the murals to his incessant drawing and redrawing of nude women in
Algiers and also to the mode of the photographer who freezes the events of a crime scene.
In “War on Architecture: E.1027,” (1993), Colomina discusses the preoccupation with war evident in European design in the 1940’s. Notions of boundary, analogies to weaponry, destruction and crime are pervasive. Here, Colomina characterized Le Corbusier’s relationship with Gray and E.1027 as essentially invasive. Her concern for Gray was merely circumstantial
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insofar as her scholarly focus was elsewhere—postwar architectural poetics, LeCorbusier’s male gaze, or restructuring history. Colomina did not clarify or even reconstruct Gray’s work or her life. In fact, through the four reprises of the article Colomina never augmented what she had to say about Gray’s work even as she shifted the context of her discussion.
At the time this first article was published, Colomina was finalizing the publication of her collection of essays, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media.18 The focus of the book—including the articles on E.1027—was the architecture of Le Corbusier and, by contrast, that of Adolph Loos. In the introduction to the last reprise of “Battle Lines: E1027,”
Colomina characterized her interest in Gray, stating that the article “grew out of an uncontrollable footnote in [her] earlier book Privacy and Publicity.”
While Colomina’s four articles on E.1027 creatively implicate Gray in Modernist history, and provide intriguing insights into Le Corbusier’s psyche, they provide no such reading for
Gray or her work. Her reading may be emblematic of Le Corbusier’s attitude toward his subject, of male-female relations in general or of the tone with which Peter Adam initially described the incident—as a rape. Possibly, it has to do with all of these factors. However, what is most
17 Colomina, Beatriz. War on Architecture. 18 Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media.
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interesting, because ironic, is the way Colomina, by virtue of blind spots in her critical gaze, takes
Gray and her career as an inactive object.
The question remains what Le Corbusier found at E.1027. Le Corbusier executed eight murals in and around the house. All but one are still life and are within the interior of the house.
The sole exterior mural, Three Women, is unlike the other seven murals in many ways. It lacks any color but seems complete. It occupies an exterior wall in the basement level patio of the house, hidden from almost all views. It contains identifiable human characters.
According to Corbusier, he depicted Eileen and Badovici – two lovers both of whom he represented as women.
He also included a third woman, what he called “the wanted child.” From left to Fig. —4. Le Corbusier, the three women, after restoration in 1977. right we see Gray, the so-called child, and a feminized Badovici. The mural shows an erotic scene with limbs enfolded, and bodies entangled. We see caresses as eager glances flash between the three rapt lovers. There is compositional tension. While Gray caresses the “child,” Badovici’s figure maintains a more
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994). 29 Chapter 1
objective viewer’s distance. Gray’s and Badovici(a)’s relationship with the child is not equivocal.
She is physically engaged while he seems more inclined to sponsor the activity.
The compositional quality of this mural corresponds to that of the house. We see folded arms, overlapped appendages, and strangely juxtaposed bodies. Lines slip from body to body linking all three into one form, undermining the simple autonomy of each. The utter transparency of the figures intensifies the effect. One figure touches another in the same way in which one touches E.1027’s adjustable furniture. The “wanted child” must be the house, the living thing that Gray wrought with Badovici. His remoteness in the mural is telling as his contribution to the design of the house is dubious. In this sense, Le Corbusier’s “intrusion” at
E.1027 was more thoughtful and intuitive than Colomina acknowledged.
Philippe Garner, in his book Eileen Gray: design and architecture, 1878-1976, of 1993, sees
Gray’s work as a positivist development from symbolist design motifs towards a functional, utilitarian aesthetic. 19 His analysis focuses largely on the transition from her lacquer work to the carpets she created later, especially the compositions that she scribed across the lacquer surfaces and within the fabric of the carpets.
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Caroline Constant’s scholarly background is in the study of dwelling as it pertains to cultural, historical constructs. In her first essay on Eileen Gray, “E.1027: the Non-heroic
Modernism of Eileen Gray,” (1994) she examined Gray’s critical engagement with Modernist principles at E.1027 in light of her early involvement in furniture design.20 It concludes with an examination of the events surrounding the murals LeCorbusier painted on the walls of E.1027 in
1938-1939.
Constant also addresses Gray’s critical positioning relative to Le Corbusier and other
Modernists. For Constant, Gray exercised LeCorbusier’s principles in a manner more humane, everyday and sensitive than other contemporaries. ‘Function’ is essential for her though with a subtle shift. Human passions ground function in lieu of the ‘sanitized mathematics of
Modernism.’ In this view of Gray as a more sensitive Modernist, Constant does little to change the perceived scope of her work.
Eileen Gray: an Architecture for All Senses of 1996, is Constant’s second published
19 Philippe Garner, Eileen Gray: Design and Architecture, 1878-1976 (Koln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1993). 20 Caroline Constant, "E.1027: the Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians v.53, no. Sept. (1994): 265-79.
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contribution to Gray scholarship.21 The book is a series of essays, edited by Constant and
Winifred Wang, promoted by the editors as an attempt to “re-evaluate Gray’s work in light of the failings of both Modernist and post-Modernist stylizations.” The research and discourse, initiated in seminars at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, provided material for three exhibitions of Gray’s work. These exhibitions were held at the Museum of Arts and Crafts,
Frankfurt-am-Main, at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and at the University of
Florida. The book aimed to link the sensuous, anthropocentric character of Gray's rugs and chairs with the architectonics and experience of built space. It established Gray's dialectical attitude toward product and user and her practical sense of pleasure as representing her significance in the Modern Movement.
The first essay, entitled “Elegance and Abstraction: on Eileen Gray’s Lacquer Works” by
Volker Fischer, discusses the evolution of Gray’s lacquer work and concludes that this development prefigured the sparse but sophisticated architectural work that followed. Fischer described Gray’s development into an eminent lacquer worker and highlights notions that remain continuous throughout her work. These notions include attention to materiality and construction, craft process over mass production, and the relationships between design and craft.
21 Carolyn Constant and Wilfried Wang editors, Eileen Gray: an Architecture For 32 Chapter 1
Suzanne Tise, in her “Contested Modernisms,” considered the historical circumstances under which Gray’s E.1027, arguably the most erudite Modernist expression of its day, was ignored by the French public. At that time, France was engaged in a self-conscious evaluation of its international status in the decorative arts. Germany had already established itself as the premier nation in Modernist expression, mass production and efficiency. The French, having formed a commission to evaluate the international market, found they could not compete with
Germany for pre-eminence. The French considered France the center of the artisan world and, for the sake of nationalist concerns, refocused the nation’s efforts on traditional, decorative arts that emphasized singular hand-made artifacts. Ultimately, the general public was convinced that
Modernist works were un-Frenchin fact Germanthus dooming the French Modern
Movement to a marginal life in France. Gray’s work never achieved the acclaim it deserved in the country of her residence and where nearly all her work was executed, even as others, especially Le Corbusier, would garner international acclaim working largely in France.
Sarah Whiting’s contribution, entitled “Voices Between the Lines: Talking in the Gray
Zone,” was the most intriguing attempt in this collection at a fresh reading of Eileen Gray’s work.
She took texts by Gray and Badovici as a touch point for understanding Gray’s approach to
All Senses, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Graduate School of Design,
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design. Gray’s writings took the form of dialogues, discussions between two people. Likewise,
Tise claims that Gray’s work can be seen to engage various dialogues, not the least of which was a dialogue between the architecture and the user. Beyond this, Gray’s work, taken as a whole, can be seen as a dialogue between other likeminded Modernists such as Bruno Taut, Pierre
Chareau and Adolph Loos. In fact, a dialogue can even be identified wherein Gray engages the monologically minded modern heroes such as Le Corbusier and Wright. The gray zone, as
Whiting described it, is neither black nor white, but an in-between that implies a flexible, discursive practice. Whiting invoked Paul Valerey’s dialogue, Eupalinos, to guide her further investigations along this tangent. For Valerey, dialogue is a fundamental form of communication and engagement and stands in contrast to the abstraction of monologue that attempts a synthesis.
In fact, all processes seem to be reducible to dialogue—perhaps a single, ongoing dialogue. The implication is that Gray’s work, her sensibility, is more in tune with everyday human existence than that of her contemporaries. The gray zone is a clearing within which Modernist principles achieve a heightened sense of collaboration, criticism and, ultimately, humanity.
Stefan Hecker and Christian Müller, in their contribution, “A Virtual Reconstruction of the Maison en Bord de Mer,” attempt to reconstruct E.1027 in the state it must have been prior to
1996).
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Le Corbusier’s meddling. Hecker and Müller are concerned with three main issues: the formal and material circumstances of E.1027, the exigencies of collecting and systematizing artifactual data, and the potential of virtual reconstruction as a tool for research and documentation. Hecker and Müller provide formal analyses, uncovering the folded and overlapped nuances apparent in
Gray’s sophisticated spatial conception; they also recover the building’s original textures, materials and colors.
The most provocative aspect of this exercise addressed the status of the architectural artifact and its varied and sometimes competing histories. In conventional restoration, historical priority is given to a specific period or episode in the life of the artifact, over and above myriad others. This is especially problematic considering Gray’s stipulation that she conceived her work as ‘development’ rather than ‘completion’. The authors respond to this issue with virtual reconstruction, which they offer as a method that, in contrast to physical restoration, alleviates the risk of unwitting destruction of valued material. This is particularly important for the life of
E.1027 because Le Corbusier left his own marks on the artifact. His marks have superceded all other history. Virtual reconstruction allows us to evaluate the original work as well as the later intrusions by Le Corbusier, and finally, presumably, to question the relationship between them.
Caroline Constant’s own contribution to her and Winfred Wang’s collection,
“Architecture and the Politics of Leisure,” set Gray’s preoccupation within a growing demand for
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leisure by the common French citizenry. Constant pointed out that Gray’s architectural works consistently addressed programs of leisure, from her early vacation homes to the ‘communal’ retreats among her later unbuilt works. In the early 1900’s, the leftist political alliance, Front
Populaire, was instrumental in eliminating the elitist connotations of leisure. They sponsored legislation that limited the work week to 40 hours and required all laborers to be granted a full two weeks paid vacation time per year. This political shift coincided with Gray’s ‘mass’ leisure studies and, according to Constant, explains Gray’s shift from an individual-elitist centered program to one that upholds the health and needs of a common class citizenry.
Constant does little to address Gray’s critical engagement with the popular movement.
If, as other scholars have noted, Gray repeatedly took ideological structures to task, one wonders if her concerns agreed with the Front Populaire’s conception of leisure. It is even possible that
Gray worked to critique their agenda as she did the Modernisms of Le Corbusier and Adolph
Loos.
Perhaps a more appropriate term for Gray’s ‘program’ was not leisure but retreat. The term means to recede, to flee, to turn within, or to hide. A more inclusive development might be traced from her earliest works, the screens and furniture, through the structures for Badovici and herself, and finally in her so-called “mass leisure” projects of the 1930’s.
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The exhibitions, articles and resulting documentation collected in Eileen Gray: an
Architecture For All Senses have generated some intriguing and insightful terms for reading
Eileen Gray’s work. This literature has been critical for a further evaluation of the subtlety and sensitivity of her work. However, while the format of the book itself is perhaps at fault, no essay reconciles an interpretive strategy with Gray’s complete oeuvre. If, as Volker Fischer argues in the opening essay, Gray’s career should be seen as a developmental whole, then one wonders how terms such as ‘politics’ and ‘leisure’ can be implemented to link Gray’s earliest works to her last. Gray’s own writings seem to be a potentially fruitful starting point. The terms with which she addresses various concerns, while seemingly simple and everyday, may be unfolded to find subtler intentions and latencies. The apparent consistency of her works over her career seems to warrant equally consistent interpretive treatments.
Ethel Buisson and Beth McLendon’s “Eileen Gray Homepage”22 is published as a part of
Archiere, an online collection of articles centered around Irish Architecture. Buisson and
McLendon augment their articles periodically, expanding the discussion therein. They rely on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari to found Gray’s work on dialogue. Much like Jean Paul
Rayon, Buisson and McLendon, in their analysis, point out the existence of oppositions and their
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subsequent inversion. Where Rayon’s tracing of these structures is merely formal, Buisson and
McLendon draw a more complex fabric of relations among Gray’s design philosophies, English
/French, Irish /English, inside /outside, furniture /architecture, and other pairings.
Buisson and McLendon attribute the prevalence of these oppositions to Gray’s status as a perpetual foreigner, both as an Anglo-Irish woman and as an expatriate living in France. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is critical in these constructs, especially their work on Franz
Kafka.23 Deleuze and Guatari propose that Kafka’s work represents a minor literature that employs a language, German, with the intention of destabilizing it from within, by resisting and subverting certain common interpretive constructs. For Buisson and McLendon, the relation of major and minor architecture can be seen in Gray’s inversion and destabilization of interior and exterior. The authors point out that with Gray’s work, distinctions between the two become difficult to maintain as their boundaries shift or disappear.
Career
Gray’s career is interpreted by most scholars as having developed toward increasing
22 Ethel Buisson and Beth McLendon, "Eileen Gray homepage" in Archiere (www.archiere.com/eileen_gray/dialogue.html, accessed 2000). 23 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
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complexity and sophistication: from drawing and small art pieces to furniture, rugs and interiors and then, finally, architecture. This interpretation takes a great deal for granted. The privilege given Gray’s architectural work and Badovici’s involvement is not surprising. Here is the myth of the master architect: the heroic Modernist and his legacy. Gray’s assumed legacy was a modern architecture of “sensitivity” and “practicality” that nonetheless lacked rigor. Such is the curse of the woman architect. But to privilege her architectural work is misleading. To assume the thrust of her work is primarily architectural, or architectural at all, is to miss the richest dimension of her life work.
Ultimately, what is of primary concern to critics to date, is the relation between design decisions and the stated ideas that drive them. Any discourse on the continuity of ideas naturally privileges an open discourse that systematically excludes what is left unsaid in such decisions—secret compulsions that arise out of a web of past and future decisions and contribute to an authentic context of meaning.
translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
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2.0 Situating Her/Self: the Significance of Gray’s Dwellings
“’Why don’t you build?’ Jean Badovici asked Gray around this time, and so he changed her life”24
Eileen Gray first visited Paris in 1900. She traveled with her mother to see the Universal
Exhibition being held there. She enjoyed the city greatly and returned in 1903 with two friends from the Slade School, Kathleen Bruce and Jessie Gavin. This was the first significant leave she took from her mother and sisters. The three women rented a small pension in Rue Barras for a brief time. Soon Gray broke off and rented her own flat in Rue Bara. This Paris visit lasted until
1905 when she left for London and her mother, who was ill.
When she returned to Paris in 1907 she was 29 years old. The move was needed relief for
Gray who longed to explore a world distant from the one she had known. As Peter Adam states,
“Paris meant a new identity, a new freedom.”25 Her apartment on the Rue Bonaparte was situated in the English section of the city so it was more familiar than it might have been. Paris in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s had become a romantic destination for artists in search of a more bohemian experience. Many of those expatriates would be famous or already were. Apollinaire
24 Penelope Rowlands, Eileen Gray (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), 14. 25 Adam, Eileen Gray, architect/designer, 34.
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was there, as well as Oscar Wilde, Alleister Crowley and Gertrude Stein. Expatriates could be seen in the cafés and parks of the area but rarely ventured far from the quarter. Gray was no different. She intently focused on her lacquer in her new apartment. The work required a humid, dust free space, so she set up shop in the bathroom. The craft was time intensive and
Gray found it easy to ignore daily events in Paris. Having established her work environment within her place of dwelling.
Gray retained her apartment in Paris until the day she died, returning to it often, especially late in life. This locale was a central point in her self-image, the first step she took on her own, her first opportunity to define herself anew. The circumstances under which she departed Paris each time are significant.
Gray’s relocation of 1907 was the first of many moves that she would make in order to start anew. She moved to London to flee the First World War and returned to Paris immediately afterward. In 1925, she left to build her retreat home in Roquebrune on the Mediterranean with her friend Jean Badovici. In 1932, she left Badovici behind, building another dwelling several miles from Roquebrune in Castellar. She returned to London again at the onset of World War II.
In 1954, she took her last home, further north in Saint-Tropez.
With each new residence, Gray’s self-imposed isolation became more absolute. Although
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she had numerous close friendships through her life, few of them lasted. Her relocations served to formalize her growing autonomy and reclusion; through them she distanced herself from relationships that were tiring or simply bored her or threatened her with their intimacy.
This chapter is concerned with those places that Eileen Gray created for herself—the dwellings wherein she built a life of work and play—and their significance as hinge points in her life. The circumstances under which she made her moves and the personal relationships made and broken through those moves create a meaningful pattern when overlaid with certain common characteristics of the homes. Even though her apartment in Paris permitted her a certain amount of anonymity, she sought to further withdraw in the retreat homes that were each remote from the business of the city. The houses occupied sites away from or out of the view of local townspeople. Access to the sites was difficult or circuitous and across a man-made thoroughfare that did not invite passersby to stop. The sites were all on high land or set on steep abutments and they afforded vast panoramic views. Such views were mediated by foreground elements that implied human occupation—of an abandoned past or of current but infrequent use.
2.1 Complicated Interiors: Exteriority and the Childhood Home(s)
Gray’s life of withdrawal was a search for a place to stay, an interior where she could nurture her own self-identity. They were settlements of sorts, where Gray sought peace and
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focus. Her search grew out of her past and her ever-changing present wherein she often found herself an outsider even among friends.
Gray’s wealth and social position afforded her the freedom to travel broadly and to attend exclusive schools. She studied at the Slade School in London for several terms and at the
Acadamie Julien in Paris for a brief time. Eileen Gray had the means to pursue the life of her choosing and she had special access to privileged social circles. She visited North Africa, Spain,
Peru, Mexico and The United States. She even took flying lessons. Peter Adam’s biography presents a woman who led a rich and adventurous life.
Gray was never quite comfortable socially, however, even among close friends. Kathleen
Bruce, with whom Gray attended the Slade School and the Academie Julien, wrote in her memoirs that Eileen was “lovable, though rather remote.” Adam described her as an attractive, charming and witty young woman with numerous suitors. Her social limitations were not for lack of opportunity. They came from within. Gray chose to disengage herself from these social contexts, possibly because she felt ill at ease. She had her own preoccupations and concerns that may not have been easily resolved with those of others. Socializing would be especially difficult in this case. Peter Adam tells us that Eileen could often be very frank, rude and even intolerant, but never confrontational. Hence her tendency for withdrawal.
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In Adam’s biography, there are several themes that underscore an outside-ness, a “not belonging,” that might have oriented Gray toward her reclusive existence: 1) the life experience of a woman, especially within a male-dominated Modernism, 2) the life experience of a lesbian 3) the life experience of the youngest of three daughters.
Woman
Gray felt the constraints of a female artist while studying at the Slade School in London and even at the Académie Julian in Paris. Women were not allowed the same freedoms as male students. Women were not permitted on outings without a chaperone. They were required to maintain a tidy house and to host tea socials. They were not permitted to talk to the drawing models.
Peter Adam tells us that such constraints frustrated Gray. Her attendance at the school bears this out; her name appears on its register less and less as time wore on. Her interest in formal education and the authoritative guidance of instructors waned. She stayed away from the school and throughout her life chose to work at home rather than in a studio or atelier. The home was Gray’s place of work, her creative realm, and it was the subject of that creativity. Design, for
Gray, was no profession. It was the way she inhabited her world. In this sense the distance from home implied by the atelier was likely unthinkable to Gray. Rather, her work was “domestic”
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Modern as opposed to the “public” Modern espoused by her male counterparts.
Mihalyi Csikzent and Eugene Rochberg-Haulton, in their psychological study of work and creativity, tell us that if one can effect change in the world then the change obtains a profound relation to the measure of one’s self. ‘Work’ establishes the productivity of an individual and sets the stage for the production of the self hence reinforcing identity.26 It may follow that Gray’s obsession with her work, with the continuity of that work through her entire life, was an effort on her part to establish or locate her self in the absence of a conventionally consistent place to stay. Her home was her work and her work was her home.
Lesbian
Gray was lesbian—or bisexual. She developed close friendships with Natalie Barney,
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas, Evelyn Wylde, as well as a sexual relationship with the famous singer Marisa Damia. Stein and Tolkas were explicit about their lesbian relationship, but
Gray and most of her other friends were not so bold. In France, homosexuality was not outlawed as it was in England but there were limits. Such lifestyles were tolerated provided they were enacted out of the public view. “Hiding” was still required.
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The group spent several summers together in Paris and on the
Mediterranean. They each owned cottages in the country and the women would travel between them, staying at each for weeks at a time. They also shared their art. Wylde made rugs and introduced
Gray to that medium around 1922. Damia was an actress and Gray wrote several plays at various points in her life.
Fig. —5. Kate Weatherby and Evelyn Wild at Wyld’s Gray withdrew from these house near Cannes. friendships just as she did from almost all others. These women were life-long friends but Eileen was careful to keep them at a distance. She visited them on
26 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Haulton, Object Relations and the Development of the Self, (Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
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summer trips through the south of France but these were brief. The women were of similar backgrounds and interests, and had more in common with Gray than anyone else she would know. Still, Gray took their company sparingly.
Youngest Daughter
Grays’ mother, Eveleen Pounden, came from wealth. Her father, James Maclaren Smith, was an artist and Eveleen’s parents did not approve of him as a suitor. The two asserted their independence and strong wills: they stole away to Italy to avoid the meddling of Eveleen’s parents. When they returned to Ireland in 1863 they married and then took up residence in the
Kensington section of London. There they raised their five children—James, Ethel, Lonsdale,
Thora and Eileen.
Eileen was born in 1878 at the family estate near Enniscothy, Ireland. The estate,
Brownswood, had been in the family for over a century. Eileen’s grandparents still lived there during her youth and the family visited often. The property was vast with plenty of places for
Eileen to sneak off on her own. Brownswood was a special place for Eileen. She felt freer, more on her own than when the family was in London. Eileen’s youth under her mother’s rule was frustrating. She resented her mother’s strict hand and had little tolerance for her siblings. Eileen was already displaying a remote character. Household rules angered her and she would often
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respond by walking alone in the countryside.
Eileen’s father left Ireland and his family and departed for Italy when Gray was still young. She was close to her father and she felt his absence deeply, often traveling to visit him in
Italy or to meet him in the Alps.
The life he led must have effected her. The possibility of freedom was embodied in him—an artist and a traveler. Susan Kavaler-Adler discusses the importance of the father in a daughter’s ego formation. If the father is supportive and facilitating during her formative years, her creativity and motivation will be greatly enriched. The father’s engagement in her activities further reinforces her ego formation. Finally, the daughter is likely to mirror the father by shaping her ego in his likeness. 27 James had a vast effect on Eileen. Her interests as a designer and the activities she pursued as an adult closely follow the example he set. Gray enjoyed visiting far off lands and pursued artistic endeavors until she was over 90 years old.
27 Susan Kavaler-Adler, The Compulsion to Create: A Psychoanalytic Study of Women Artists, (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 1993),69-74.
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By the time Eileen reached her teenage years, life at Brownswood had changed drastically. Eileen’s oldest sister Ethel married
Henry Tufnell Campbell. His effect on the family estate was drastic. Henry undertook new
Fig. —6. Brownswood Manor in Enniscothy, Ireland, as construction at Brownswood, turning the old it existed during Gray’s childhood. manor house into a neo-Elizabethan mansion.
The new house was vast and Eileen thought it garish and inappropriate. Childhood homes are critical in establishing identity, so the erasure of that image must have been very troubling. As
Fig. —7. Brownswood Manor after renovation. Peter Adam states, “It was the destruction of her childhood home, more than anything else, that finally drove her away from her family.”28
Before Brownswood’s reincarnation, Gray traveled to London only on occasion.
Afterward she spent far more time there than at Brownswood in Ireland. Gray’s dual residency is another source of alienation. She felt at home in neither place. Gray is an English name, and
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her lineage was Anglo-Irish. Due to the political and historical tensions between Ireland and
England, the Anglo-Irish were historically “other” within Ireland as well as England. To the
Irish, the Anglo-Irish were English while the English dismissed them as Irish. They appeared as outsiders at home and in England.
28 Adam, Eileen Gray, Architect/Designer, 17.
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2.2 The first house and Jean Desert
Gray purchased her first house in 1921, a vacation home in Samois-sur-Seine. The modifications she made to this structure were limited and simple: some pilasters applied to the exterior that unified the main house and an adjoining structure that she purchased in 1923.29 She then built a garage in a stable Fig. —8. Jean Badovici. on the property. Her spatial concerns remained unexplored. She seemed more intent on designing and making the furnishings for her new home than extensively manipulating the exterior or reconfiguring the interior space with new construction.
Gray met Jean Badovici in 1921. Her friendship with Badovici developed both personally and professionally. Badovici encouraged Gray to sell her furniture, rugs and small objects. Gray was not a good salesperson. Her personality did not allow her to ‘sell’ herself so she sold few pieces and the shop inevitably failed. She closed it in 1927 and returned everything to her
29 Carolyn Constant discusses at length the specific modifications made by Gray. See, Constant, Eileen Gray, 41-2.
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apartment—her safe enclave on the Rue Bonaparte.
2.3 E.1027
Badovici wanted a place on the Mediterranean
to spend his summers but lacked the capital to
purchase one of his own. He suggested that Eileen
undertake an actual built project and Gray’s creative
ambitions must have inclined her to respond. Gray and
Fig. —9. E.1027 as seen from the Mediterranean. Badovici set off for the South of France in 1925 to find a
site suitable to build. Their search began along the
coastline and they settled on a rocky coastal plot in
Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. It was very secluded and
Fig. —10. E.1027 as seen from the rail tracks above and to the east. lacked any automobile access.
The house Gray built is set down a steep
precipice from the road, visually isolated, and accessed
by a mere footpath. From the road above, one hardly
Fig. —11. E.1027 as seen from the rail tracks above and to the west. notices E.1027’s rooftop at the edge of the coast. It sits low and is overwhelmed by the wide expanse of the Mediterranean. From the sea, it is in plain
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view, its white walls standing out against the rocky cliffs. The house is only visible from a distance, from the sea, where little direct access is afforded. However, from the land and the path, the building remains in hiding. It is visible when inaccessible, yet accessible when not visible. This double isolation heightens its effect as a get-away, a retreat. The home is intended for entertainment and one’s approach requires foreknowledge or even an invitation. The exterior already establishes an interiority. One must be in–the–know, or an insider, to find this place.
Gray designed and built E 1027 as a retreat
house for two inhabitants—Eileen and Jean—but
adaptable to bed several guests and a servant. The
public entry to the house is set deep in the crook of the
Fig. —12. E.1027 as seen from the footpath. “L”shaped plan. To the left is low brush and the
hillside rising steeply. To the right is the living room
wall of E.1027, pierced by a strip window that is in turn veiled by shutters. The approach is protected and almost entirely enclosed. It is already an interior.
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On entering E.1027, Gray deferred access to the
heart of the house. Upon entry one must turn, turn
again and turn a third time before finding oneself in
the main room of the dwelling—the living room. The
Fig. —13. E.1027 entry level floor plan with entry sequence shaded. interior angle of the “L” plan acts like a hinge, as if the
building has been folded out to create the entrance.
The hinge-like plan conceals a maze of service spaces: baths, halls, pantry, storage. On one hinge- plate is the living room for entertainment, on the other is the servant’s quarters and the kitchen that opens up as a terrace during warmer weather. Nestled deeply within the hinge we find the master bedroom. Symmetry is vaguely apparent about this hinge, at least in plan. The locus of the hinge is a curved wall, a knuckle or a half-circle, that reveals the formal operation.
2.4 Tempe à Pailla
Gray’s relationship with Badovici, like most of her relationships, grew strained. Gray tired of his numerous affairs and fibs. After a short while she decided to move on to a second plot of land not too far from E.1027. She had purchased both parcels at the same time as if already preparing for her escape.
She built her second retreat home there, Tempe à Pailla, literally time of straw. This home,
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however, was a retreat for her alone. Eileen said the name stood for “the maturation of her ideas”. There is something of a private evolution in this name rather than toward the public, toward her inner self and issues addressable there.
The foundation for the new house was already
in place when she first found the sitethree
underground masonry cisterns and a retaining wall.
Two of the cisterns act as a dark basement and the
Fig. —14. Tempe á Pailla from the road third is a garage. The house nestles behind the
retaining wall, popping up over the wall as if from a point of safety. The clean white stucco of the new constructionthe above ground living areascontrasts with the stone of the earthworks. The retaining wall is carefully violated in a few instances for access and exposure—the entrance gate, the patio and the strip window of the main room.
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The retaining wall and the house above run
along the edge of a country road. The height and
proximity of the structure and the road must have
drawn Gray to the site. The house is practically on top
of the road and yet, due to its height and the obtrusive
wall, visual privacy was maintained. The masonry Fig. —15. Tempe á Pailla from its lowest courtyard
wall is foreboding. Much like E.1027, the house seems at once in plain view and still altogether hidden and inaccessible. The height of the wall gives
Tempe à Pailla special views across the valley. The foreground to the valley is a rolling hill that is home to a vineyard.
Entry is gained through a series of courtyards that turn on each other. The spaces create separation for the entry that again is analogous to conditions at E.1027. A cast-in-place concrete stair slips behind the retaining wall past an opening cut in the wall. It screens the courtyard beyond as it takes rises to the building’s proper entry, an open patio with complete visual access to the family room, the vineyard and the valley beyond. At the patio, the wall has been cut down flush with the pavers and in the wall’s place Gray slung a crisp, white sunscreen. It provides shade from the sun, a sense of containment much like a guardrail, and veils the patio from views at street level. The redundancy reaffirms the status of the wall as bunker and the screen as
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protector.
When Jean Badovici died in 1956, a small
memorial show of his work was organized. Gray was
not invited to contribute but she did attend. The plans
and some photographs of E.1027 were on
Fig. —16. Tempe á Pailla’s sun deck/entry display—attributed to Badovici with interiors by Eileen portico.
Gray. Gray’s peers had praised E.1027 and Tempe à
Pailla. E.1027 especially was published in several articles
and at two CIAM conferences. After years of support for
CIAM she ceased to be invited to the annual meetings.
She allowed her membership to expire.
Fig. —17. Tempe á Pailla’s sliding stair.
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2.5 Lou Peru and the notebooks
Shortly after Badovici’s death Gray began the documentation project that occupied her for the rest of her life. She began to collect her life work into a series of notebooks. These volumes, brief and mostly graphic in presentation, are most likely the result of the recent pain around Badovici’s death: the loss of a friend and, perhaps more importantly, her exclusion at the hands of her contemporaries. The notebooks are Gray’s attempt to tell her professional story, to pre-empt later interpretation, to guide the course of scholarship, to establish yet another domain of control, to revisit her own past and finally, to revise her own identity. That this project was ongoing through the remainder of her life should not be surprising. All of her work turns on the same goals and grows from a life long search that was driven by the absence of her father during childhood and given scope by the destruction of her childhood home.
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3.0 Naming, Wit, and other Non Sense
In 1922, Eileen Gray decided to sell her furniture, rugs and small objects. She did this only after considerable prodding from Jean Badovici. Public exposure of this kind was such a big step for a woman of her shy demeanor that she could not have done so without his emotional support. She established a small shop on the Rue Bonaparte and named it Jean Desert.
Jean Desert was Gray’s first attempt at a spatial design. She fitted out the interior with rugs, tables, and chairs—all on display for sale. As both Peter Adam30 and Carolyn Constant implied,31 she was not confident enough to change the exterior on her own so she asked Badovici
to help with the front door and specifically with the
transition from the street to the interior of the shop.
They created a series of layers to provide a gradual
entry to the shop. It is telling that Gray called on
Badovici for help in this portion. She had refused her
Fig. —18. Jean Desert own identity in the name of the shop because she was too shy and feared exposure. Then she resisted designing the shop’s exterior face. In both cases,
30 Adam, Eileen Gray, 120. 31 Constant, Eileen Gray, 146.
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she chose not to take public responsibility for what stood in plain view. Her work was displayed in the large storefront windows, and entry was easily gained by passersby; but like her furniture and rugs, she preferred a quieter public presence.
It is telling that her own identity is not ‘stated’ in the nameJean Desert. Again, she was too shy. However, the name is revealing. Gray chose “Jean”, a male name, because she felt male designers enjoyed greater credibility than women (Adam, 1987). She chose “Desert” because she had recently visited North Africa. The last name bears covert reference to that journey.
Alternatively, one can read of the name: “Jean has gone” or “Jean has deserted.” Finally, “desert” connotes loneliness in the French: “Jean has been deserted.” One wonders, as Carolyn Constant did, if this refers to an elusive Badovici.32 In any of these translations, the name implies distance: a remote land or some disengaged persona—Jean, Eileen, or any other. So, on careful interpretation, the name speaks of Eileen despite, and because of, the initial hiding.
This portion of the thesis unfolds the relevance of naming and wit in Gray’s work. She showed consistent interest in naming and took the concern to extremes. Names, titles, and inscriptions present vital clues to her thinking; clues that are typically dismissed as mere play and yet may be among the richest spatial dimensions of her work. The issue is opened by
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examining the names of her houses, E.1027 and Tempe à Pailla. Gray’s fascination with naming shows early in her lacquer work, her furniture and other creative endeavors. By the late 1920’s, naming takes on intense significance in relation to the acute pragmatism so revered by her contemporaries and recent critics.33 Through naming and inscriptions, Gray calls into question the Modern eye for the functional, public, aesthetic, sanitized art object. This is especially potent in the furniture and interiors she designed and named at E.1027 and Tempe à Pailla..
3.1 Naming E.1027 and Tempe à Pailla
E.1027 was conceived “to entertain guests“34 and is where they received friends and colleagues through the 1930’s. E.1027 is an acronym: ‘E’ is for Eileen, ‘10’ stands for ‘J’ (the tenth letter of the alphabet), ‘2’ stands for ‘B,’ and ‘7’ stands for ‘G’: these are the initials for Eileen and
Jean. The sequence of the lettering is notable. Eileen’s initials bracket Jean’s: “Eileen (Jean
Badovici) Gray”. This oddity subverts the usual renaming in a heterosexual marriage: “Mrs. Jean
(Eileen Gray) Badovici”. Where the bride is typically subsumed by her husband in the name, the reverse here is true. Is the order of power in a patriarchal family also inverted? Eileen was the
32 Constant, Eileen Gray, 43. 33 Peter Adam (1989) and Carolyn Constant (2000) seem especially concerned with this side of her work. 34 Gray, E., & Badovici, J. (1996). “From Eclecticism to Doubt.” In Eileen Gray: an Architecture For All Senses. Edited by Wilfried Wang and Caroline Constant
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designer, the maker, throughout their relationship. She was the creative energy that drove production. She drew and planned the houses, the furniture, and the rugs and other small pieces. She worked with the builders and oversaw construction and she financed construction.
Jean was the provocation and the support: providing encouragement for Eileen’s endeavors.
Eileen bore responsibilities most often assigned to the patriarch and Jean those typical of the bride. Gray’s name was first and last in the acronym and she had the first and last word in the work.
E.1027 has much to say about its creators but the name is no simple acronym such as a monogram or the initials of a government agency. Gray’s and Badovici’s initials are encoded so that their relationship is covertly introduced. One wonders why this is necessary. Eileen had taken lesbian lovers in the recent past so the code might be especially important. Encoding is a technique for gay and other marginal communities to communicate within the group while avoiding detection by outsiders, thus hiding an unacceptable relationship and avoiding persecution. However, her relationship with Jean was obviously heterosexual. E.1027 was a
“straight” home. There is hiding but it is a complicated issue. Recall that access to this “retreat” home is difficult, that it is sited on the edge of a rocky coast and that the “front” door is nestled
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Graduate School of Design), 17-27.
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deep in a cranny. This house for entertaining guests is barely open to the invited public.
Gray produced that which remains public by its very nature—a house, whose access remains public, if retienctly. Not feeling entirely at home in a space accessible to all, Eileen created further significance by way of language. The code established a private spatiality unknowable to the public. The disposition of the interior; the walls, corridors, and doors, reinforces the privacy, first reserved in the name, by blocking views, creating crannies for escape and requiring circuitous routes from one room to the next. The public realm of E.1027 is laced with opportunity for withdrawal.
Tempe à Pailla was also a code. With its name, Gray refers to the French proverb: avec le temps et la paille les figues mûrissant ‘with time and straw the figs ripen’.35 The proverb speaks to the care required in nurturing and cultivation; the patience necessary to realize an endeavor thoroughly and the sustained practice to develop and improve technique. Gray’s work exhibits the life-long, careful, attentiveness implied in the proverb. Her lacquer work explicitly required attention to detail both in the production of a single piece and in nurturing her skills over a span of 20 years. Tempe à Pailla, the name, is significant, but the gesture is vague. By including only two words from the proverb, tempe ‘time’ and paille ‘straw’, she revealed the smallest fragment
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possible. The link to the proverb is undetectable. In fact, it is only through Peter Adam’s personal interviews with Gray that we are aware of the story. The name would convey nothing without Gray’s anecdotal input.
The code stands out to us as an oddity, a public act of naming that remains glaringly private. In establishing the private, she relies on the public. The private domain of secret spaces and codes exists as private only if founded on the public domain. The private can even exist as private if it goes public. The names invite a public attempt to break or decipher the code.
35 Adam, Eileen Gray, 288.
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3.2 Furniture, Rugs, and other things
The names Gray chose for her earliest products seemed appropriate to their expressive
goals. Her early lacquer screens were rich in materials, symbolic content, and allusion. The
naming of these works followed suite. La Vioe Lactée ‘the Milky Way’ (1912) was her first screen.
It was followed by La Magicien de la Nuit ‘The
Magician of the Night’, (also named La Fôret
Enchantée ‘The Enchanted Forest), and finally,
Le Destin ‘Destiny’. The names of Gray’s early
Fig. —19. La Voie Lactée, screen, 1912. screens seemed mystical and symbolic, much
like the imagery the screens depict.36
These early works were extravagant
and impractical. The time involved in
production made them expensive. Few could
afford such luxurious items and since their
Fig. —20. La La Magicien de la Nuit or La Forêt Enchantée, panel, 1912. naming was highly personal we can question
36 Constant noted that Gray’s ear for the exotic is reflected in the names of the screens and the imagery they present, Eileen Gray, 33.
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whether they were genuinely intended for sale. Their pristine finish give the works an aura that thwarted everyday use. Given Gray’s predilection for hiding and her concern for the private, her choice of lacquer seems obvious: deeply reflective, translucent and impenetrable.
Her rugs bore silly names: including
chocolate (a famous French clown), and
centimeter.
In her unpublished play, The Ballet of
the Animals, of 1919, Gray unfolds a cast of
characters consisting entirely of animals.
Fig. —21. Le Destin, screen, 1913. The costumes were armatures with hinged
appendages manipulated from within by
actors. Gray named each character in some
ironic, whimsical or nonsensical reference to
character’s role in the events of the play.
Among the names were references to
Fig. —22. Centimitre, rug, 1920’s. friendships and admired acquaintances,
places she dreamt about or hoped to visit, and things that she revered. These references were unlike those she authored for her furniture
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and rugs. They were obscure at best, plainly private in most cases, and few would have sensed the meaningful implications of the names beyond a vague sense of folly.
Gray named most of her works. The names of the early screens were thematic and evoked mystical reveries reflecting the symbolic imagery depicted. They seem naive, romantic and deliberately evocative. Gray sought fantastic themes that had a charm and warmth that seemed humane.
By contrast, there is an obvious “practicality” in her late works and therefore, seemingly, the furniture lends itself to a highly pragmatic interpretation. The pieces carefully and deliberately fit a need: often more than one. The finishes became more touchable and seemed less fine, though in fact they were less durable than the lacquer. Scholars such as Peter Adam and
Carolyn Constant observe that Gray’s early obsession with emotive themes and refined art pieces matured into a concern for the utterly useful and the everyday.
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3.3 The Transat Chair and Breuer’s B-3 Chair
For example, Gray’s Transat chair of 1925 is comfortable: holding the body gently and firmly, molding to the curves of the seated body. The headrest is on a rod, permitting the cushioned piece to swivel. It cups the head when one is settled deeply within the chair then
adjusts to the incline of the back if
one sits more upright. The
construction is of steel and
upholstered leather. Gray reveals a
deliberate structural frame, an
armature for the leather that receives
the body gently. The steel frame is
Fig. —23. Transat, chair, 1925/26. sturdy yet light; easy to move or
store. In addition to its physical
lightness, the chair lacks visual mass or large surface areas. It is broadest surface, the leather sling in which one rests, is a series of cushions, sagging between the supporting frame. Its flimsiness; the way it gives in to gravity, its tautness under the weight of a seated body, further deteriorates the mass of the chair. In summary, its design is at once compositional and practical.
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Gray’s design for the Transat owes some debt to Marcel Breuer, especially its novel use of materials. Breuer was experimenting with bent tubular steel around 1925.37 The B-3 chair was the result of his early studies that explored this new material idea. Tubular steel opened new possibilities for furniture design. Architects such as Mies and Le Corbusier sought to populate their modern spaces with equivalent expressions in the decorative arts. The clean forms of the
metal and its minimal mass
corresponded nicely to Modern
design while its fabrication allowed
for easy mass production. This had
practical importance but it also
meant the furniture was less costly to
produce and affordable to the Fig. —24. Wassily Chair, 1925.
average family.
Breuer was intrigued by the furniture of Geritt Reitveld especially the compositional qualities of his Red, Yellow, Blue chair. The B-3 chair reflected this influence with tensile fabric
37 For a discussion of Breuer’s furniture, see C. Wilk, (1981). Marcel Breuer Furniture and Interiors (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981). For specific reference to the Wassily chair and the B-series tubular steel furniture, see p.35-57.
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that defied the lure of gravity, a maze of steel tube elements, a taut seating surface. The B-3 chair and the Transat chair look similar and both reflect the influence of deStijl artists. Badovici owned a version of the B-3 chair so Gray was familiar with its design. Both utilized tubular steel in similar ways. Both chose leather in the seat to hold the body.
Despite formal similarities in their work, Gray was expressly critical of de Stijl. In her opinion deStijl works (including Breuer’s) were detached compositional exercises that lacked any link to life. Reconsidering the two expressions bears this out. Breuer’s chair seems static despite the obvious compositional tension. The B-3 is taut while in disuse and strains to maintain its shape as nearly as possible under the strain of an occupant. The Transat, by contrast, deliberately responds to the human body. Its slung leather seat goes taut with a seated body, responding to its weight, cradling it. The headrest adjusts as well, rotating to receive a head or shoulders. One never rests a body part on bare metal in the Transat because the leather is so carefully placed.38
The Transat is almost womb-like despite the inclusion of tubular steel. The “subject” of Breuer’s composition seems to be composition while the “subject” of the Transat is the moment one takes a seat. Certainly Gray imbued her chair with a concern for life in so far as it comforts the seated body in a way that seems almost loving.
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But is this as far as Gray’s critique can be taken? Consider the name given by Breuer.
Standard Möbel, the production company with which Breuer partnered, produced the chair and marketed it in their catalogue as the “B3” chair. The “B” signified Breuer, the “genius” artist, while the number denoted the chair’s ordinal position in their catalogue. The other works by
Breuer included in the catalogue were all named in the B-series. These included his fabric back theatre chair (B-1), the wood version of the theatre chair (B-2) and his Bauhaus stool (B-9) among many others. When deciding upon the chair’s name, Breuer Standard Moebel thought first of their catalogue and the chair’s position there. Their primary concern was mass production and the marketing of the chair for sale. Its economic capacity took priority: the implementation of tubular steel was driven by the concerns of the production line and providing an affordable product. Indeed, a concern about modern man and his economic condition existed but naming a chair by its position in a list of items for sale is certainly no rich expression of life attachment.
Ironically, the chair’s name would later be set into a much richer context via a mythologized story of its creation. As the story goes, Breuer found his early studies awkward and he never intended for this version of the chair to reach the public. Breuer showed the chair to his friend Wassily Kandinsky who was enthralled by the design. Kandinsky eased the
38 Carolyn Constant noted Gray’s use of leather in this manner. See, Eileen
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designer’s concerns and convinced Breuer to promote it. Because of this anecdote the B-3 chair is now known as the Wassily Chair. But again, this naming was anecdotal and took hold well after the chair went to market, making the contrast in naming all the more striking. The effect of this renaming was in the same vein as Gray’s sense of naming, to push until the piece reattached with life itself. While the compositional, practical, production driven description of the Transat chair holds some truth, a far richer ground of meaning is there for consideration.
What further life attachment does Gray make in her work? For this, we look further at the transat chair. Its given name is the French: trans Atlantique. The chair reminds one of an ocean-liner deck chair. These were light, easy to move, foldable, and easily stowed during rough seas. In 1922, Eileen crossed the Atlantic Ocean to visit America. The Transat chair—its name—cites Gray’s own visit to America, a new and exciting adventure. As Peter Adam states, the lure of far-off places was great for Eileen and references to journeys are found elsewhere in her work. Adam rightly observes that E.1027 seems like a ship on the sea as it sits at the edge of the Mediterranean. Nautical Architecture is referenced in such details as the building’s handrails, the expressed sun decks and the inclusion of canvas sun screens that allude to the sails of a ship. Such references are common in Modern Architecture and especially Le Corbusier’s
Gray, 105
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villas. Such references are known to grow from a fondness for modern ship design as an expression of the engineer free of capriciousness. For Gray, however, the reference is very differently romanticized. The building overlooks the sea, and on the North wall of the living room, Gray fixed a map of the Caribbean. Written on the map is invitation au voyage ‘an invitation to a journey’. Gray makes a journey of approaching the house with the hidden path that winds down from the road. She references ships with the details of the building and with a map of a far-off sea. Finally, she invites visitors on another journey in the view provided across the waters of the Mediterranean, an exotic land.
Gray’s vacation travels were significant to her and to her thinking and there were other journeys as well: Gray’s relocations. She repeatedly set out on her own to set up home in a new locale. These journeys were private and highly personal. Most times, Gray took her furnishings with her when she sought a new home—but not always. She left almost everything behind when she departed from E.1027. As she said, “Memories do cling to things. So it is better to start anew…”39 These items bore the emotional imprint of her shared life with Badovici. When she needed to free herself of Badovici she freed herself of their shared possessions as well.
39 Adam, Eileen Gray, 257.
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3.4 Time to Drink: Passages at E.1027
Gray perpetuates a name/function disjunction in her bibendum chair. The piece appears deliberately comfortable with plump padding and soft leather. Like the Transat chair, seated
comfort was an expressed concern in
its creation. In fact, its aesthetic must
be related to Le Corbusier and
Perriand’s fauteuil grand confort (petite
modele) ‘very comfortable armchair
(small version)’ and fauteuil grand
Fig. —25. Bibendum Chair, 1925. confort (grand modele) ‘very
comfortable armchair (large
version)’, both of 1928. These works
appear well cushioned, even over-
stuffed.
Where LeCorbusier and
Perriand name ‘comfort’ Gray does
not. Bibendum in the Latin translates Fig. —26. fauteuil grand confort (grand modele), LeCorbusier, 1928.
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as “time to drink”. Gray often joked with friends that the chair’s shape was a loving reference to the Michelin man. One can imagine the charming story that would unfold around the chair as friends share a drink in the early evening. Invariably, the subject of the chair’s naming would be raised and the explanation would follow. “Time to Drink” establishes a conversation. The vagueness of the Latin name at first hides, then provides the trajectory of a conversation: a question and then Gray’s response. The chair participates in the conversation, provoking in a way that reaches beyond mere novelty. In fact, Gray’s acknowledgement of emotional attachment and life affirming events strikes a fundamental po int of departure between her thinking and that of Le Corbusier.
3.5 The Decorative Art of Today
Recall that Gray left her possessions to avoid feelings recalled by their presence. Le
Corbusier discarded his furniture for entirely other reasons. He outlined these in “The
Decorative Art of Today.”40 The thrust of the 1925 book was that decorative art—furniture—was not decorative at all because furniture was too much like “equipment.” Le Corbusier refuted the personal and interior role of furniture. The objects of man’s everyday existence were to be
40 Le Corbusier. The Decorative Art of Today. Translated by D. F. Krell. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press; 1925, 1987).
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understood as tools to serve his needs. Only proper works of art—paintings, sculptures, architecture—were capable of personal, emotive expression because they were not to be used but to be pondered. They were freed of entanglements of ‘use’ and so permitted ‘disinterested’ contemplation. One simply did not ponder the essence of furniture because its essence was needful use.
A chair or loveseat was to be used, used up, and then discarded when it could no longer efficiently serve its function. If, as Le Corbusier claimed, furniture was to be the servant of man, to serve the needs of man without drama, then Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, with whom he collaborated, named their furniture appropriately. Most pieces were plainly named along
“equipmental” notions, according to a ‘functional’ role or some trait of use. The most notable piece is their chaise-longue à réglage continu ‘chaise lounge with continuous adjustment’ (1928).
Others were siège à dossier basculant ‘stool with pivoting back’ (1929), table en tube d’avion ‘table with an airplane structure’ (1929), fauteuil grand confort ‘large comfortable armchair’ (1929), and siege tournant ‘pivoting stool’ (1929). These names underscore how one is to use the piece, how one engages it as a thing. The furniture’s role as a tool is its essential attribute. It is merely useful and when it no longer optimally satisfies our needs then Le Corbusier tells us to discard it.
Le Corbusier’s functional naming attempts to define and restrict the work. It focuses the intentions of the designer and eliminates meanings and “relationships” that are unwanted and
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presumably, unwarranted. For Le Corbusier this meant eliminating any personal or private references. Furniture is to be coded by use and, therefore, detached from inner life.
This assumes that the intentions of the designer represent the full scope of the thing: neither more nor less. Such an assumption cannot be maintained, because the unpredictable and unmanageable happenings in life often win out. The life of the object quickly reaches beyond the intentions of the designer and its meaning assumes other possible trajectories. The capacity of naming to limit, is limited.
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3.6 Passages at E.1027
E.1027 also speaks, almost literally. “Enter softly” is printed on a wall adjacent to the
front door. “No laughing” is written
in the living room above the day bed,
where friends gather in conversation.
Near the front door, Gray wrote
“hangers”, “umbrellas”, “boots” and
“little things”. In the bedroom, she Fig. —27. Invitatin au Voyage, mural at E.1027, 1926.
wrote “socks”, “shoes”, “pajamas”,
“pillows” and at the bathroom sink she wrote “teeth”. There is writing in most every room of
E.1027. The font seems to contrast the whimsy of the statements. Its letters are tightly controlled,
measured and mechanical. The utterances seem the result at once of obsession and playfulness.
These phrases provoke with whimsy, charm and even sarcasm and contrast with the sensibility
and practicality evident in the house. All the while, they appear to be an ongoing inside joke.
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The phrases stand out broadly, inscribed across walls and things that may, at any time and normally all the time, slip into mere use and function. The inscriptions carry a secret or peculiar meaning either inaccessible or comical to the public, a meaning that acknowledges the
necessity of the everyday, but finds real
significance beyond it, especially by way
of incongruity. The private space
overlays and reconfigures the everyday
space. The walls and spaces would slip
Fig. —28. Entrez Lentement, inscription at E.1027, 1926. Still into a normal spatiality without the wit visible within later mural by LeCorbusier. Shown seated are Badovici, Le Corbusier, and his wife Yvette. that gives meaning and inscribes a different, private, spatiality in contrast to and yet reinforcing the everyday.
The inscriptions initiate privacy and then initiate something more: a conversation. Recall the “straw” at Tempe à Pailla. Peter Adam drew the explanation from Eileen in their private interviews. Vagueness demands further explanation: elicits a question. One can imagine the conversation that follows, “Why ‘enter softly’?” and Eileen replies, inviting us into her world.
The initial hiding of the encoded name, ironically, invites an opening-up of the private. This has the appearance of a coquettish dance, teasing the visitor with opacity then opening to a gradual revelation. Moreover, this opening provides a specific interiority that is very rich and
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presumably to Gray’s liking. The name creates a place for discussion as much as the spaces of the house itself: the place set up when two acquaintances share a moment in conversation or share in the shady afternoon sun of a porch. The naming of Tempe à Pailla points to the significance of
Gray’s work to her life. Despite the inherent distance and the insider knowledge needed to decode the colloquialism, there is a potential revealing. Gray opens vital links between the work at hand and past works; all of which gather the concerns of living and of a lifetime.
The writings at E.1027 were not a sudden appearance. The first traces appear in the drawings of her hypothetical project of 1926: “A house for an Engineer.” Those drawings were among the first architectural studies that Gray undertook. Again, Badovici played a role by prodding her to take up the new medium of architecture. He recognized Gray’s spatial sensibility and encouraged her to experiment with architecture. She began by studying the works of Le Corbusier and Adolph Loos, both friends of Badovici. These studies took the form of tracings and later, of redesigns. She redrew Loos’s Villa Moisi. As Carolyn Constant notes, Gray appreciated Loos’s spatial complexity and material richness but she did not espouse the hierarchical and patriarchal values inherent in his space planning. Her revisions to the Loos house turned on this issue, instituting Le Corbusier’s free plan. The two notions—Loos’s
Raumplan and Le Corbusier’s “plan libre”— are brought to bear on each other in Gray’s
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redesign. Carolyn Constant notes that they created a richer and freer environment.41 More importantly, the process indicates Gray’s critical stance toward two significant contemporary architects. For Gray, the shortcomings of each were circumvented by the inclusion of the other.
Constant and Adam assume this was merely a useful exercise during her first architectural studies, a crutch while she learned the new art. By considering this early design process immature and derivative, however, one neglects a significant implication of Gray’s thinking. The process, as portrayed by Constant, is dialogical and so the derivative nature of the work is necessary.42 Derivative is an inadequate term because its significance goes beyond method to effect. Gray appropriated the formal languages employed by Le Corbusier and Loos not in order to resolve them but to work them against each other. Her final scheme is dimensionally unresolved, which is understandable given the difficulty of her task. The project achieves a kind of tension that reaches beyond its unfinished state. Gray sets into play an irresolvable opposition like those of hidden and revealed, practical and impractical, private and public, functional and meaningful, small and large, interior and exterior and draws herself, Le
Corbusier and Loos into a ‘tri-a-logue.’
41 Carolyn Constant. Eileen Gray. (Cambridge, Mass: Phaidon Press, 2000). 42 Constant, Eileen Gray, 71.
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Gray, in her un-built project House for an Engineer (1926), appropriated Le Corbusier again. This time Gray takes up Le Corbusier’s piano nobilé and his obsession with the aesthetic of the engineer. Constant points out that Gray’s font selection is important. Eileen wrote in Le
Corbusier’s engineer’s font: the text of the machine. Constant explains that Gray was poking fun at the machine, that she was openly critical of the “machine for living.” Gray found reducing life to function ludicrous. In this context, Gray’s inscriptions seem sarcastic. The very notion of a sarcastic wit contrasts with the “matter-of-fact” mode of the engineer that Le Corbusier upholds.
Freud tells us that a joke is never merely a joke. Rather, in the wit there is tension.
Something remains hidden. The witticism serves primarily to hide, and yet, to covertly reveal what has been left unsaid. Malcolm Bull defines the hidden as a condition that is neither openly stated nor utterly beyond what can be known.43 The joke is a means to accomplish something and at the same time it allows one to hide as well. Given Gray’s proclivity for hiding this seems especially potent. Appropriation became a critical tool not unlike the dialogues she wrote. On one hand, the strategy allowed Gray critical leverage. On the other, it provided her with emotional camouflage.
43 Malcolm Bull. Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality. (New York: Verso, 1999).
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3.7 Le Corbusier: the-rapist
Of course, Gray’s dialogue with Le Corbusier did not end at the drafting board. Le
Corbusier spent long periods at E.1027—plenty of time to judiciously evaluate the premises—was
‘moved,’ and painted eight frescoes on the walls of E.1027. Colomina concerned herself with only one of them, wherein he provided a curious scene on a wall in the underbelly of the house.
He described the 1938 painting to friends as they visited the house but his tone was always sarcastic and it still seems unclear what exactly he depicted there. Beatriz Colomina, in her various writings on E.1027, never addressed Le Corbusier’s expressive intent at E.1027, and for good reason. Both Colomina and Le Corbusier leave much unsaid.
Gray no longer lived at the site after moving to Castellar in 1931. If Le Corbusier spied on the house, and if the murals are the narration of what he saw, then it seems less clear that
Eileen Gray was figurally implicated. Did he see Gray and Badovici taking the posture shown in the painting of the three women? Probably not, because Gray rarely visited with Badovici; she and Le Corbusier may never have been there at the same time. If Le Corbusier was reenacting an historical event, it had little to do with Gray’s physical presence. Still, Le Corbusier depicted
Gray in the mural. Surely Le Corbusier felt her psyche was somehow folded into this setting.
Colomina, writing in 1995, cited Le Corbusier’s pejorative characterization of homeliness,
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the “theme for a psychiatrist.”44 She went on to say his quote could well apply to his involvement at E.1027. It is more likely, however, that Le Corbusier thought himself the psychiatrist rather than the patient. Psychoanalysis builds on the narrative of dreams and other life patterns and the source material for Le Corbusier’s study was Eileen Gray’s fixations at
E.1027. The medium of his exploration was the frescoes.
Gray was offended, even hurt by Le Corbusier’s intrusion. She urged Badovici to respond to Le Corbusier in a note and, to placate Gray, he did.
“What a narrow prison you have built for me over a number of years, and particularly this year through your vanity... My hut served as a testing ground, embodying the most profound meaning of an attitude which formally banished paintings.”
Le Corbusier wrote back to Badovici but the reply was directed at Gray.
“You want a statement from me based on my worldwide authority to show—if I correctly understand your innermost thoughts—to demonstrate ‘the quality of pure and functional architecture’ which is manifested by you in the house at Cap Martin, and has been destroyed by my pictorial interventions. OK, you send me some photographic documents of this manipulation of pure functionalism… Also send some
44 Colomina quoted from the original because that passage is omitted from English translations. See Colomina, Battle Lines, 27. See also, Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (Paris: Crs, 1926), 196.
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documents on Castellar, this U-boat of functionalism; then I will debate in front of the whole world.”
Le Corbusier’s threat, “send some documents on…this U-boat of functionalism; then I will debate in front of the whole world…” had nothing to do with a debate over the quality of the work. Le Corbusier had already professed his love for Gray’s sensitivities. His respect became clear when he bought an adjoining parcel of land and built himself a retreat home. His construction was simple and understated so as not to compete with the intense formal energy of
E.1027. Le Corbusier must not have intended to impose himself on the site as Colomina implies.
Rather, his construction recedes as much as possible, allowing E.1027 to stand out.
Le Corbusier’s threat involved the telling of secrets. He knew E.1027 presented ideas well beyond a simplistic, functionalist worldview. Gray etched its walls with highly personal epithets that she barely mentioned in published descriptions. She certainly never explained them. Public debate stood to reveal all that was personal, emotional, erotic and whimsical in
Gray’s architecture. Hence, Le Corbusier’s stated intent “based on his worldwide authority, to show—if [he] correctly understood [her] innermost thoughts….”
Gray never sent Le Corbusier the requested photos, choosing as always to avoid exposure. She burned her private papers in the 1970’s in a similar act of avoidance. Gray must
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have felt her private life at stake in both situations. Whereas Le Corbusier derided the psyche of modern man and his house, Gray made modern man’s attempt to conceal that psychosis her source material.
For Gray, life sprang from that which was emotional and for her, only then the ‘rigorous’ and the ‘intellectual’ gained meaning. Without the relation to life, function was barren. Function plays a critical role even in the comical naming of things. It is a pointed commentary but naming sets the thing in motion. It establishes. It is essential to the namer’s concerns. This is evident in her late works, E.1027 and Tempe, and it was evident at her earliest, Jean Desert.
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4.0 The Screen and the Hinge: Hiding and the Character(s) of Control
Le Destin, completed in 1913, was one of Eileen Gray’s more recognizable pieces. Its composition was dramatic, with one side of the screen composed of three human figures: two
young men striding from right to left, one
carrying an old man upon his shoulders and
the other following. The dispositions of the
three convey a kind of anxious passage, as if
the second young man is in pursuit, and it is
unclear if he is antagonist or worried onlooker.
He reaches forth to either make way for Fig. —29. Le Destin, lacquer screen, 1913.
himself or to merely peer through a door. His
reach crosses between two of the screen’s
panels so that the fold of the screen enhances
the spatiality of the scene. He seems to address
the corner of a room or, appropriately, to hold
open the leaf of a door. The gesture
undermines the status of the screen as ‘blank’
Fig. —30. Le Destin, lacquer screen, 1913. medium and instead foregrounds its folded,
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upstanding structure as well as its role as screen. The screen has taken a “pivotal” role in the story it presents in the same manner that it functions in its milieu.
Philippe Garner, in his Eileen Gray: Design and Architecture, noted that Le Destin marked an essential transition for Gray’s work—the shift from figural representation to abstract expression.45 This is because on the side opposite the three figures she inscribed an abstract composition of shapes that formed fluid and dynamic gestures. The narrative scene on one side appears to translate into an abstract expression on the other side. While the stylistic transition seems obvious and absolute, the tenor of the disparate sides go hand in hand. There is obvious directional movement in each and the colors, textures, and line-work convey the same atmosphere of the dramatic. Both achieve tension and intensity but in different ways. The two sides appear mapped against each other, indicating a correspondence between the narrative subject on one side and the abstract composition on the other.
Le Destin was essential to Gray’s work too as an early screen and hence, as a work piece that incorporated the hinge. Screens stand by virtue of the hinged folds that give them a broader base and greater stability. The hinge also permits one to manipulate the screen, to shape it and hence to shape space and privacy within a room. The screen, when appropriately configured, can
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become a wrapper or a shield for the body. The comfort inherent to privacy, as provided by the screen, is augmented by the comfort had by merely controlling one’s own privacy. The hinge was the essential vehicle for control and privacy in Gray’s screens and for her obsession with screens in her subsequent work.
The foci of this chapter are the screen and the hinge—ideas that Gray used with increasing creativity from the mid-1910’s to the end of her career. At first, the hinge appeared in the folded planes of her lacquer screens that appear in some of her early interior projects as ways of dividing space. Later, in her architectural works, Gray applied the hinges at various scales, revealing them literally at times, merely alluding to them at others. As a device, the hinge establishes two united sides that are attached, but nonetheless remain unresolved into a whole.
The screen and the hinge were connected as concepts that performed a two-fold function for
Gray: hiding and controlling.
45 Garner, Design and Architecture, 17.
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4.1 From Panels to Screens
Gray’s early screens were assembled from individual lacquer panels. Gray generated numerous lacquer panels during the 1920’s, honing her skills and inventing new techniques. She
conceived them through numerous
exercises; then stitched them
together with a hinge. She folded
them so they could stand free from
the wall. She implemented them as
doors, and sought ever-changing
Fig. —31. De Lota Salon, 1919-24. ways to more fully integrate them
with the spatial milieu. In the de Lota
Salon of 1919-24, she clad the walls entirely with panels that echoed forms in the room’s furniture.
By obscuring the original wall in this way, Gray anticipated her next step, peeling the panels off the walls and setting them up in the room as freestanding screens. Taken to this new spatial category, the screens allowed Gray to further enrich the meaning she sought in her work.
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Gray’s Brown Lacquer Panel of 1913 is typical of the work she was doing at that time. The panel’s saturated lacquer hues of brown, orange and black added to the provocative scene unfolding therein. We see two struggling figures, one of whom is wielding a knife. The armed
man is just about to win out, having
gained leverage, forcing his enemy
down into the lower right corner of
the panel. One senses that blood is
about to be spilled onto the panel’s
rich black field. Gray drew a series
of bright squares that represent
apertures (along the top edge of the
Fig. —32. Brown Lacquer Panel, 1913. panel). In the left-most aperture, a single female figure quietly watches over the two men struggling below. The relation between inside and outside remains unclear. Do the men occupy a large dark room or an unlit alleyway?
Is the woman leaning on the sill of a window or the railing of a balcony? Is she inside, outside, somehow both, or neither? Do the men know the woman? Are they fighting over her? Are they even aware she is present?
The panel is as compositionally and materially rich as it is theatrical. The figural
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elements are pushed to the edges, with the three apertures along the top balanced against the struggling men at the lower right. A line is implied, racing diagonally across the square panel, between the woman observer and the men, leaving the deep dark field untouched at the center.
The light brown apertures are set off with thin silver edges that intensify their contrast against the dark field.
The figure-ground dynamic is further complicated by the figures. The woman’s clothes and skin are black, rendering her almost a silhouette. We nearly fail to notice the serenity of her expression. Where the woman is heavily distinguished from her context, the men are lost in theirs. The clothes are as black as the field and only articulated at the folds by dark-gray line work. The hair and the cape stand out bright orange against the field and their skin is the same light brown of the apertures.
Gray invested the panel with compositional tension but it is clear that she pursued composition in order to serve what she offered as content:: the theatrical drama of the scene. The lacquer figures allude to a scene of conflict, strife, desire, voyeurism, proximity and distance. In a sense, the narrative at hand in the brown lacquer panel corresponded well to the thematic that moved her generally: that of “screening.”
Her screens were not simple devices for spatial control. When considered in hand with
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her continued interest in retreather ongoing hermetic existence, her remote vacation homesthey take on far-reaching importance. ‘Screens’ speak to hiding in various ways. They divide space, creating a visual and physical barrier. Gray’s screens can be moved around, reoriented and folded to shape privacy in various ways. The screens are two sided by their nature. They divide this side from that. They strike a line in a space. They separate two realms but not in an absolute way. Noise, light and odors find their way around and through a screen.
The two sides are permitted interaction because conversations go unimpeded. Likewise, the abstract and figural sides of Le Destin fall into conversation. The abstract and figural in Gray’s work should not be thought of as distinct. They are co-mingled and stem from the same concern.
Recall Gray’s goal, “to push abstraction until it reattached with life.”46
46 Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici. "From Eclecticism to Doubt," in Eileen Gray: an Architecture For All Senses, edited by Wilfried Wang and Caroline Constant (Mass: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1996), 17-23.
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4.2 Entries and Vistas
By the time Gray created the Block Screen around 1922, she had left behind the obvious figural representation of her earlier works. Gone were the figures or any obvious narrative
content. Instead Gray created a
deep, dark sensuality in the black
lacquered surface. The Block Screen
is made up of 40 lacquered
rectangles each with a raised
concentric rectangle at its center.
The composition is stitched together
by steel rods, two in each block.
Each stack of four blocks is
dovetailed with the next, much like
running-bond brick, and rotates in
Fig. —33. Block Screen, 1922-25. unison to create the folding necessary for stability. The columns perform similarly to the panels of Le Destin, but where the paneled screen was rich in its imagery and narrative connotations the Block Screen had a richer, more spatial complexity. By separating its blocks Gray created a screen that was crisp and
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formally rigorous, yet visually light and playful. In the same glance, there are figure and ground, a semi-impeded view that renders a partial presentation of the space beyond, and numerous reflected images, all superimposed. Finally, the screen’s many parts beg to be adjusted and repositioned so that the visually sensual aspects of the screen become literally erotic. Gray made the subject of the block screen human touch much as Le Destin’s young man holding aloft his companion and reaching out to push aside the next panel.
The Block Screen later appeared in the entry hall to the de Lota Apartment of Paris, 1924.
The screen stands in front of the walls, partially hiding them. It defines the space, becoming the
room itself and preempting the wall,
the fundamental unit of architectural
expression. All the complexity and
sensuality evident in the screen is
now manifest as a complete cradle
for the body. That the screen takes
over in this way at the entry is no
Fig. —34. Block Screen in hall of de Lota Apartment, 1924. surprise. The entry is the point of exposure where the exterior is breached to create a threshold. It is a point of vulnerability where the inside exposes itself to visitors. The screen is a protective device and though the block screen
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at the de Lota apartment did not function to screen in a conventional sense, it did impose the notion of spatial control. The screen was recognizable as a screen and as such carried with it all the connotations of screening. Hence, the point of entry to the apartment, its moment of weakness, rang with a protective tone because of the screen’s presence. Positioned properly, the screen becomes an actual foil for the body, another layer of clothing akin to Loos’s cladding, especially when the screen’s role is mostly symbolic.
Carolyn Constant’s observations regarding Gray’s strip window can now be given an agenda. For Constant, Gray’s version of the strip window affords a broad view that follows the
movement of the human
eye but, in
contradistinction to that
of Le Corbusier, also
provides a foreground of
shutters and wall
elements, an Fig. —35. E.1027 ‘screened’ strip window at entry.
intermediate realm of
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awnings, deck furniture and railings, and only then the vista beyond. 47 Gray’s window, in light of her obsession with the screen, can be understood in terms of exposure and control, protection and visibility. Gray’s window remains the wrapper for the body, its protection. Gray did not reduce her window to a tool of clarity such as Le Corbusier’s ‘vision machine.’
Tempe à Pailla’s perimeter is a screen as well. It sits behind a rough stone retaining wall.
The earth that the wall formerly held back was excavated so the house could nestle in its stead where it peaks out as from a point of safety. Gray carefully violated the wall in a few instances for access and exposure: the entrance gate, the patio and the clerestory strip window of the main room. The first two are essentially stagnant and carry much of their character in material and composition. The clerestory, however, takes a literal, active role in shaping light, view and privacy in the house’s interior. Gray fitted the entire strip with a series of vertical blinds, each of approximately 12” width and 30” height, and center-mounted on pins. They rotate in unison to regulate sun levels and to effect privacy.
At the entry to E.1027, Gray defers access to the interior. Tall cabinets and screens deflect movement, view and space. There is a hinge in plan, as if the building has been folded out or
47 Constant, Eileen Gray, 107-8
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pried apart. The hinge is a concatenation of service spaces: baths, halls, pantry, and storage. On one leg is the living room and guest quarters, on the other are the servants’ quarters and the kitchen. Beyond, is the master-bedroom. Symmetry is vaguely apparent about this hinge, at least in plan. The pivot of the hinge is a curved wall. The hinge initiates the rift between public and private. The walls and disposition of the plan seem especially situated to deflect movement, view and space.
Recall the entry sequence at E.1027: the guest must turn upon entry, turn again and then turn a third time before finding the living room. The hinge operates in the physical act of entry when the entrant repeatedly turns on his path, virtually doubling back on himself. In the midst of the spatial maze, before gaining proper entry, the visitor first engages the architecture.
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The last impediment to access of the living room is a tall curvaceous cabinet. It acts as a shield of sorts, being the final departure from inside to out, the final obstacle to pass on the journey inside. The cabinet’s shape appears to turn one into the living space and so is a hinge for
Fig. —36. Axonometric drawing of E.1027 with entry cabinet movement. shaded grey.
At Tempe Gray built three such cabinets. There too they occupied points of threshold between inside and out. A fourth instance at Tempe, the armoire in the master bedroom, has a similar
formal concept a quasi- Fig. —37. Entry cabinet at lower entry of Tempe à Pailla.
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cylindrical mass rendered as a skin. Gray made it more complete and distinct in its form by setting it free from adjacent walls and making it a closed geometric figure. One also engages it more actively as a thing as the cabinet
can be extended along its length to Fig. —38. Wardrobe at Tempe à Pailla in the closed and compact position. accommodate greater volume.
The functional sophistication of the armoire is far beyond that of the E.1027 entry cabinet. Still, its spatial role is similar. It straddles the line between the bed space and the changing area, providing visual separation between the
bedroom door and the latter. Fig. —39. Wardrobe at Tempe à Pailla in the open and elongated position.
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In a real sense, these shaped cabinets act as sentinels guarding entries that are otherwise composed of shifting, sliding elements. They anchor, situate and preserve a demarcation that might otherwise be lost in the dynamic play of elements. They are more than mere compositional elements. One might perceive a kind of security in their presence. They are guards and their assembly was comprised of skinthe thin outer shelland innardsthe shelves and small items contained therein.
These guards are similar to the Block Screen Entry of the de Lotta apartment, in that in addition to functioning as guards in the literal sense, they provide an emotional sense of the secure. Where the Block Screen mapped the notion of screen into the entry area, the ‘guards’ provide a bodily mass that anchors the anxious moment of arrival. Eileen Gray stood beside these bodies as she greeted her acquaintances upon their first arrival to her homes or even her boudoir. The guards were of comfort beyond that which their storage capabilities provided.
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4.3 Passages and Turns
At the far end of the E.1027 living space is a sleeping nook, nestled into the corner. This
is the guest bedroom that also acts as an informal reading area. Occupying this space, settling
into its built-in divan, entails turning around. One faces out, to the larger room, and in fact, the
rest of the building. A slotted window reveals a view along the length of the sundeck. The built-
in casework folds open to reveal writing utensils, a writing surface, pillows and other comfort
items. Privacy here is a matter of receding into a corner whence one can survey the entire scene.
Fig. —40. The Living Room at E.1027 with a Transat Chair to the right, a Centimitre carpet in the foreground, a Bibendum Chair next to the fireplace and the reading nook beyond.
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A fireplace engaged with the living room wall acts as a veil, a foreground for the guest nook that peers out to the living room and also for the living room that gazes out to the sea. A partition folds out to finalize the isolation, enfolding the occupant within. There is even an exit that slips quietly out to the sundeck with direct access to the stair and shoreline below.
Gray carefully planned E.1027 to allow numerous places to hide
Fig. —41. The reading nook at E.1027. and distinct zones of passage. She provided a plan diagram to reveal the breadth of her concerns. The walls of the plan almost disappear in the diagram. Those at the exterior are only indicated at the corners.
The interior walls are reduced to single thin line. Dashed and solid lines with arrowheads locate the movements of people. Gray’s diagram indicates the furniture with a fine line. A series of dashed arrows indicate the points where a visitor reaches out to shed personal effectshats, goulashes, coat, gloves, umbrella, and little things. Distinct paths are identified and occupants deliberately consigned to each. Thick lines mark significant thresholds in the spatial layout. The two thickest are a door to the master bedroom and that of the public face to the master bath. Both
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are adjacent to the stair that accesses the roof terrace and so the line of public/private demarcation is very intense.
The servant, the dotted lines, begins her journey through the house at the bottom of the service stair. From there she accesses her bedroom, access to the main floor, Fig. —42. Plan diagram of E.1027. the kitchen, access to the bathrooms, crossing the living space in plain view.
The owner moves through the private areas of the plan. The points of contact between owner and servant are junctions that allow only brief encounters. They are thresholds, occurring along the way to deliberate destinations. Separation and privacy are maintained as servant and owner pass mute, no pause for casual exchange, all interactions are held at arm’s length.
At Tempe à Pailla, the internal intrigue is, to a certain extent, absent. This house is Eileen’s alone and so its program is far simpler. Unlike E.1027, there is no need to divide the house
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among its various inhabitants. The subtleties of separation evident at E.1027 are largely absent.
The layering of space and the frenetic hinging appears only sparingly on the interior. These instead are pushed to the exterior as louvers: devices for closing out a view, modulating the sun, focusing on the interior.
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4.4 Things in Their Place
A hinge stitches two things together, binding them in a range of possible relationships. The hinge dynamically fixes a context by tying the pieces together. The hinge invites playful manipulation because it renders an object incomplete, always requiring readjustment, and capable of new
Fig. —43. Wardrobe at E.1027. identities.
Gray’s wardrobe at E.1027 twists and slides, shifting from one mode to another. It invites engagement as panels pivot out to reveal an interior. There are numerous cubbies, each strictly articulated from the next, that seem more like small closets than drawers. They heighten one’s Fig. —44. Wardrobe at E.1027.
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sense of specificity, as if the cubbies were each intended to contain a single particular thing. The use of the hinge here also makes the cabinet seem more human, as if the drawers would reach out to hold Gray rather than the inverse. While the wardrobe was large and fixed in place, it none- the-less moved. It vibrated in tune with Gray’s daily life.
Gray’s adjustable table, with versions built between 1925 and 1928, was designed to roam. Its light steel frame provides a clear space in the body of the table allowing the foot to slide under a bed or chair. Its vertical
Fig. —45. The Adjustable Table at E.1027. support reminds one of a trombone slide with a handle at the top and a pin stop below to fix it at the desired height. A photograph of the guest bedroom at E.1027 that Gray published in L’Architecture Vivante indicated Gray’s functional intent. The photograph, however, betrays the nuance of her design sensibility. The pattern of the rug next to the table includes a series of dark arches. These
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correspond to the semicircular foot of the adjustable table. One arch, like the foot of the table, slips under the bed. While the table can certainly roam free, Gray intended that it reside in a particular region and it seems most at home with this rug in particular.
A furniture display at
Jean Desert showed similar intentions. Gray created a sofa with a subtle but definite curve. Its bed portion and the
‘floating’ backrest beyond create a concentric condition
Fig. —46. Chrome and Leather Sofa, lacquer occasional table, and Circular Rug, 1926-29. that corresponds to the concentrate patterns in her rug. She brought her circular occasional table into the scene and located it just off the rug’s center. The pieces have been deliberately placed and one can imagine that this ensemble would focus a gathering of friends—as a subject worthy of discussion and as a setting around which to sit and converse.
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4.5 At Arm’s length
The master bedroom at Tempe à
Pailla is a split room, the sleeping quarters on one side and a dressing area on the other.
The line of demarcation between the two realms is a shallow step, a change in plane: Fig. —47. Bedroom at Tempe à Pailla. Light shade: dressing area. down into the bedroom or up into the Dark shade: cube dresser. vanity. The cube dresser, Gray’s rendition of
‘le style camping,’ slides along this step.
Two of its four legs are shortened to accommodate the change in plane. The realm of the piece is strictly defined because
Fig. —8. Cube Dresser in closed position. it can never stray from the step. Gray’s critique of ‘le style camping’ hangs on this subtle distinction; while the dresser is not a built-in piece, it is none-the-less affixed to the architecture.
Fig. —49. Cube Dresser in open position.
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The cube dresser has much in common with a servant. The line of passage recalls the one traveled by the servant at E.1027, a strictly programmed route. The cube dresser, however, maintains a different relationship with Gray. At E.1027, the junctions are brief crossings. In the bedroom at Tempe à Pailla we see utter engagement. The cube slides parallel to Eileen’s movements rather than perpendicular, remaining at hand for every need. The dresser is anthropomorphic in its symmetry, recalling an ergonomic diagram in plan. Its hinged drawers are arms extended to assist Gray’s preparations. The furniture-as-servant is afforded an access, indeed a relationship, with Eileen that the ‘human’ servants were not. The freedoms she allowed objects and acquaintances were always subject to limitations. The cube dresser could be moved per her whim but only within a certain trajectory of use. Likewise, her adjustable table bore certain limitations and suggested its own locale.
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The drive to keep her things in the places of her choosing was perhaps most intense in the Satellite Mirror.
There, Gray found the means to keep her hand mirror at the ready.
An arm-like assembly of hinges and rods reaches forth from a circular vanity mirror. At the end Fig. —50. Satellite Mirror, 1926-28. of the arm, on a swivel, Gray located the hand mirror. While the design is simple and pragmatic, if not anal-retentive, its origin may be far more emotive and erotic— a perfume advertisement set in the de Lota apartment designed by Gray. The photograph depicted Madame Mathieu-Lévy, reclining in
Gray’s Pirogue Sofa in the apartment’s Salon, gazing into a hand mirror held at arm’s length. The setting was rich and sensual and seems especially emotive when contrasted to a contemporary photo by Le Corbusier. There, Charlotte Perriand was shown in the now famous Chaise Longue on which the two collaborated in 1932. Perriand wore a simple skirt and blouse suitable for day wear. She turned her head away from the camera with her face to the wall beyond. Her arms were casually at her sides and her legs crossed at full length.
111 Chapter 4
Fig. —51. de Lota Salon, 1919-22. Fig. —52. Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, Chaise Longue, 1932.
Perriand was positioned to demonstrate the chair’s shape, nothing more, and the notion that a scene was unfolding there, erotic or other, was deliberately suppressed. The contrast in these two images underscores the emotive character of Gray’s every design decision. Indeed, the privacy, functionality, and practicality evident in her work always harkens back to emotional concerns, to the individualist and separatist drives of her psyche.
112 Illustration Credits
1. From Penelope Rowlands, Eileen Gray. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002): 6.
2. From Peter Adam, Eileen Gray, Architect/Designer. (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1987): 137.
3. From Kathryn B. Hiesinger and George H. Marcus. Landmarks of Twentieth- Century Design: an Illustrated Handbook. (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1993): 74.
4. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 311.
5. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 296.
6. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 16.
7. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 17.
8. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 34.
9. From Rowlands, Eileen Gray, 54.
10. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 235.
11. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 194.
12. From Caroline Constant, Eileen Gray. (Cambridge Mass.: Phaidon Press, 2000): 99.
13. From Joseph Rykwert, "Eileen Gray: Two Houses and an Interior, 1926-1933." Perspecta 13/14 (1971): 66-73.
14. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 261.
15. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 264.
113 16. From Rowlands, Eileen Gray, 86.
17. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 270.
18. From Rowlands, Eileen Gray, 46.
19. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 74.
20. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 76.
21. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 29.
22. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 183.
23. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 267.
24. From Hiesinger, Landmarks, 95.
25. From Rowlands, Eileen Gray, 38.
26. From Hiesinger, Landmarks, 110.
27. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 198.
28. From Constant, Eileen Gray, 123.
29. From Rolands, Eileen Gray, 29.
30. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 79.
31. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 99.
32. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 58.
33. From Baudot, Eileen Gray, 35.
34. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 96.
35. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 200.
114 36. From Rykwert, Two Houses, 69.
37. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 267.
38. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 274.
39. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 274.
40. From Baudot, Eileen Gray, 55.
41. From Rowlands, Eileen Gray, 77.
42. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 193.
43. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 226.
44. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 226.
45. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 202.
46. From Rowlands, Eileen Gray, 53.
47. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 282.
48. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 280.
49. From Adam, Architect/Designer, 280.
50. From Constant, Eileen Gray, 112.
51. From Rowlands, Eileen Gray, 36.
52. From Beatriz Colomina. “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism.” In Sexuality & Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina. (New York: The Princeton architectural Press, 1992): 106.
115 Selected Bibliography
1. "Lacquer Walls and Furniture Displace Old Gods in Paris and London." In Harper's Bazaar (1920).
2. Adam, Peter. The Adjustable Table: E 1027 by Eileen Gray. Frankfort am Main: Verlag form, 1998.
3. ———. "Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier." In 9H: on Rigor. edited by Richard Burdett and Wilfried Wang. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989.
4. ———. Eileen Gray, Architect/Designer. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1987.
5. ———. Eileen Gray, Architect/Designer. New York: H.N. Abrams, 2000.
6. Badovici, Jean. "Eileen Gray." In L’Architecture Vivante , no. Winter (1924): 27- 28,[36].
7. Baudot, François. Eileen Gray, translated by Anthony Rudolf. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1998.
8. Buisson, Ethel and Beth McLendon. "Eileen Gray homepage." Web page, unknown publ. date [accessed January 2000]. Available at www.archiere.com/eileen_gray/dialogue.html.
9. Burdett, Richard, and Wilfried Wang, editors. 9H: on Rigor. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989.
10. Colomina, Beatriz. "Battle Lines: E.1027." In Center: a Journal for Architecture in America v.9 (1995): [22]-31.
11. ———. "Battle Lines: E.1027." In The Sex of Architecture. eds. Dianna Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, 167-82. 1996.
12. ———. "Battle Lines: E.1027." In The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice. edited by Francesca Hughes, 2-25. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996.
116 13. ———. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture As Mass Media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994.
14. ———. "War on Architecture: E.1027." In Assemblage no.20 (1993): 28-29.
15. Constant, Caroline. "E.1027: the Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray." In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians v.53, no. Sept. (1994): 265-79.
16. ———. Eileen Gray. Cambridge, Mass: Phaidon Press, 2000.
17. Constant, Caroline, and Wilfried Wang. Eileen Gray: an Architecture For All Senses. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1996.
18. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Rochberg-Haulton. Object Relations and the Development of the Self. Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
19. Diamond, Rosamund. "Eileen Gray: an Introduction." In 9H: on Rigor. edited by Richard Burdett and Wilfried Wang, 148-9. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989.
20. Doumato, Lamia. Eileen Gray, 1879-1976. Monticello, Ill.: Vance Bibliographies, 1981.
21. Franke, Rainer. "’Pourquoi Ne Construissez-Vous Pas?’ Chronologie Der Villa E.1027." In Baumeister v.94, no. June (1997): 62-7.
22. Garner, Philippe. Eileen Gray: Design and Architecture, 1878-1976. Koln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1993.
23. Gray, Eileen. "Interieur à Paris, 1924." In L’Architecture Vivante , no. Winter (1926): l32.
24. Gray, Eileen, and Jean Badovici. "From Eclecticism to Doubt." In Eileen Gray: an Architecture For All Senses. eds. Wilfried Wang and Caroline Constant, 17-22 Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1996.
25. ———. "Maison en Bord de Mer." In Architecture Vivante , no. Winter (1929).
117 26. ———. "La Maison Minimum." In L’Architecture D’Aujourd’Hui v.1, no. n.1 (1930): 64.
27. Hecker, Stefan, and Christian F. Müller. Eileen Gray. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1993.
28. Johnson, J. Stewart. Eileen Gray, Designer. New York: Debrett’s Peerage for Museum of Modern Art, 1980.
29. Kavaler-Adler, Susan. The Compulsion to Create: A Psychoanalytic Study of Women Artists. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 1993.
30. Lavin, Sylvia. "Colomina's Web ." In The Sex of Architecture. edited by Dianna Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, 183-90. 1996.
31. Le Corbusier. The Decorative Art of Today. translated by D. F. Krell. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987.
32. ———. Vers Une Architecture. Paris: Crs, 1923.
33. Loye, Brigitte. Eileen Gray : 1879-1976 : Architecture, Design. Paris: Analeph, J.P. Viguier, 1984.
34. Rayon, Jean Paul. "The North Star and the South Star." In 9H: on Rigor. eds. Richard Burdett, and Wilfried Wang, 164-87. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989.
35. Rowlands, Penelope. Eileen Gray. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002.
36. Rykwert, Joseph. "Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design." In Architectural Review 152, no. 910 (1972): 359-60.
37. ———. "Eileen Gray: Two Houses and an Interior, 1926-1933." In Perspecta 13/14 (1971): 66-73.
38. ———. "Un Omaggio a Eileen Gray: Pionera Del Design." In Domus no. 469 (1968): 29-31.
118 39. Safran, Yehuda. "La Pelle." In 9H: on Rigor. eds. Richard Burdett, and Wilfried Wang, 155-63. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989.
40. Shanker, Sonal. Eileen Gray’s E.1027: a Computer Simulation Project and an Educational Resource for the World Wide Web. Master’s Thesis: University of Cincinnati, 1997.
41. Wilk, Christopher. Marcel Breuer Furniture and Interiors. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981.
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