For much of her life, architect Eileen Gray existed at the margins of the very history she helped shape.
Her most iconic work, a coastal villa perched on the cliffs of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in southern France named E-1027, transformed modern architecture. Many of her furniture pieces are still in production today, and her "Dragons" armchair remains the most expensive piece of 20th-century design ever sold at auction, for $28.3 million.
Yet, while her work remained an important part of modern architecture’s history, the woman behind the designs languished in relative obscurity for decades. How did the world forget about such an important artist for so long?
E-1027 was built for and with her then-partner, the Romanian architect and critic Jean Badovici, with whom she began her study of architecture in 1926 (at age 46). "E-1027" is a cipher that includes both of their names: the E stands for Eileen, while the 10, 2, and 7 correspond to the first letters in Jean, Badovici, and Gray.
Eileen Gray, 1914. Photographer: George C. Beresford
The house was an embodiment of the spirit of avant-garde modernism, specifically its guiding principle: "form follows function." A building should be designed around its purpose; a home should be custom built to fit the needs of those who live inside of it. Many early 20th-century modernist efforts fell short of this stated goal, however, accounting for people’s use of designed objects almost as an afterthought. Gray’s approach to modernism was instead grounded in lived lives.
Now a museum, thanks to extensive conservation work recently completed by nonprofit Cap Moderne through the Getty Foundation’s Keeping It Modern initiative, E-1027 is a marvel of personal customization, featuring an astonishing 300 bespoke fittings, fixtures, and furniture designs. These designs were tailored to unique personal needs and particular storage or room requirements. The E-1027 table, for example, perhaps Gray's most recognizable work, was designed for her sister to eat breakfast in bed without getting crumbs in the sheets. Composed of tubular steel, it featured a semicircular base that fit around a bedpost and an adjustable surface made not of glass but a more lightweight celluloid.
Gray rejected the rigid rationality and “hygienic” austerity of modern architecture's (mostly male) leading figures, advanced most vocally by the famed Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. “The poverty of modern architecture,” she wrote, “stems from the atrophy of sensuality. The dominance of reason, order and math leave a house cold and inhumane.”
“Most critics would now agree that E-1027 and Tempe à Pailla [Gray’s other masterful architectural project, which translates as “Time for yawning”] constitute major achievements in humanizing and enriching the principles of modernism,” said Tim Benton, emeritus professor of art history at the Open University in England, who has written extensively about E-1027 and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. “Both houses are more livable and more sensitive to human needs and desires than any works by Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe.”
Yet, despite E-1027’s being heralded as her masterpiece at the time, subsequently, the world seemed to have forgotten about Gray until 1967, when the Italian design magazine Domus published a story on her. Uncomfortable with self-promotion and reluctant to exhibit her work after an early harsh review, Gray had largely refrained from publishing the type of manifestos that cemented the reputations of many male architects. “I was not a pusher,” she readily acknowledged, “and maybe that's the reason I did not get the place I should have had.”
But the story behind E-1027 represents her most significant erasure from history. Le Corbusier, a close friend of Badovici, was reportedly obsessed with E-1027. After Badovici separated from Gray in 1932, he remained the sole occupant of the house and, against Gray’s wishes, invited Le Corbusier to paint the bare walls.
Le Corbusier painting one of his murals at E-1027 in 1939. Photograph: unknown
The resulting sexually charged murals, executed in the nude, incensed Gray, who considered them a defacement. “I admit the mural is not to enhance the wall,” Le Corbusier later offered, “but on the contrary, a means to violently destroy [it].”
Le Corbusier continued to exert his influence over E-1027 until his death from a heart attack he suffered in 1965 while swimming in the waters just below the villa. When Aristotle Onassis bid on the house in 1956, Le Corbusier intervened to have a friend buy it in order to protect his murals. In the same decade, he purchased the neighboring property on which he built a modest cabin and later designed a tourist hostel directly overlooking Gray's villa. His “intrusive two-story hostel not only destroyed the visual isolation of E-1027,” but resituated it “within a Corbusian frame,” wrote Caroline Constant in The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray.
“He couldn’t get over the fact that a woman could produce such a wonderful work on her own without a man standing next to her, sort of guiding her,” said designer Zeev Aram.
Le Corbusier’s self-imposition on E-1027 had lasting effects. His murals led to the house being mistakenly credited to him, a misattribution he never bothered to correct. In other instances, the house was credited as primarily the work of Badovici. “By the time architectural interest emerged in E-1027, Badovici and Corbusier had seemingly written [Gray] out of her own project,” Jennifer Goff, the National Museum of Ireland curator, told Artnet.
Though the 1967 Domus article properly credited her for the villa, it would be several more years, when Gray was in her nineties, before she received wider acclaim for the whole of her career-spanning contributions. Now, Gray is the inspiration for a new exhibition at ArtCenter College of Design's Mullin Gallery in Pasadena (read the LA Times review).
Toward the end of her life, she deepened her interest in the role of architecture in public welfare, designing housing and social centers for the unhoused and working class. These plans, part of the Getty Research Institute’s special collections, were never realized. The drawings, as with her architectural and design achievements, emphasize the human focus that most distinguished her from the early 20th-century modernist boys' club. “Their architecture has no soul,” she wrote in dialogue with Badovici in 1929. Instead, Gray placed real people at the center of her work.
