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.