Eileen Gray: Conversations by Jan Greben

EILEEN GRAY: CONVERSATIONS

Copyright © 2022 Jan Greben. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted in Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without express permission of the author.

Publication design: Jocelyn Lau (designer), Laura Grey (consulting art director), Jan Greben (design concept)

Copy editors: Barbara Burn, Hyunjee Nicole Kim Printed and bound

Published on the occasion of Eileen Gray, the 2020 exhibition at Bard Graduate Center, New York, NY. Special thanks to the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin.

EILEEN GRAY: CONVERSATIONS

Introduction: Exhibition as Publication

Learning from Eileen Gray by Jan Greben

Jan Greben in Conversation with Caroline Constant and Mary McLeod

Seminar Projects

Model Photo Sequences

Previous Exhibitions

Credits

Preface

While designing Bard Graduate Center’s programs for our exhibition, Eileen Gray, I wanted to consider ways in which Gray’s legacy lives on today. I met with architect and educator Jan Greben to discuss programs for the exhibition, and she shared that her students make models of Gray’s work in order to better understand her designs. This practice of embodied learning, to me, represented a dialogue across time. A kind of seance, if you will. By making constructions of her work, Eileen Gray starts to live in these students’ hands and minds, potentially impacting their creative DNA.

We began to discuss having Jan create an exhibition that presented and contextualized her students’ models. We thought the exhibition might be called “Learning from Eileen Gray.” Seeing how Gray’s work might be used to teach felt like an apt accompaniment to the exhibition and perfectly matched Bard Graduate Center’s mission, as a place of object-centered research. But, like so many things, the exhibition could not be realized because COVID-19 came and our gallery doors closed. I’m delighted that our original idea will now be realized as a publication—a physical imprint of our plans. An ephemeral event translated. Eileen Gray: Conversations takes the idea of a conversation across time and makes it material.

In light of the pandemic and the many museums and galleries it shuttered for such a long time, this publication’s very materiality feels like a regenerative act. BGC’s Eileen Gray exhibition sought to look holistically at Gray’s hybrid practice, so too does this publication seek to make an important contribution to the scholarship by further situating Gray’s work in the context of teaching architectural practice.

Acknowledgments

Collaboration is a subject I have explored in the work of Eileen Gray. It has been a topic of discussion in this publication, and this book would not have been realized without a number of meaningful collaborations.

Nina Stritzler-Levine, co-curator with Cloé Pitiot of the 2020 retrospective exhibition Eileen Gray at Bard Graduate Center kindly introduced me to Emily Reilly, who invited me to design and curate an associated exhibition of work produced by students in my Eileen Gray seminar. Emily played an integral role in the development of this project and I am grateful for her shared commitment to this exhibition and ultimate publication. Mary McLeod, Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and member of the Scientific Committee reviewing the restoration of E.1027, has been an extraordinary mentor and guide for my academic work. Caroline Constant’s excellent book, Eileen Gray, has been an ongoing reference as I develop my own ideas about Gray’s work and was the textbook for my seminar course. Constant is Professor Emerita of Architecture at the University of Michigan. Jennifer Goff, Curator of the Eileen Gray collection at the National Museum of Ireland, has generously provided access to the museum’s important collection.

Maria Perbellini, Dean, and Judith DiMaio, Dean Emeritus, of the School of Architecture and Design at the New York Institute of Technology, have supported and encouraged my interest in this subject. David Diamond, Nader Vossoughian, Matthias Altwicker, and James Biber have provided crucial ongoing support for my research. Pierre-Antoine Gatier generously shared documentation of E.1027. Grants from the AIA Center for Architecture Foundation and the New York Institute of Technology provided critical support for my research.

Additional thanks go to Joseph Rykwert, Emily Stokes, John Blackmon, John Roberson, Erin O’Keefe, Michael Likierman, Tim Benton, Jean-Louis Cohen, John Keenen, Terry Riley, Annie Schlechter, Joe Serrins, Bruce Irwin, Pedro Font Alba, Marc Hundley, Franklin Vandiver, Jocelyn Lau, Laura Grey, Alexis Mucha, Amy Estes, Ruting Li, Natalie Jaggernauth, Tatiana Castano, Sherif Awad, Rob Nafie, Marilyn Corea-Ramirez, and all of the students in my seminar.

Creative Director Lisa Naftolin contributed greatly through her remarkable intelligence and talent, and her shared understanding and appreciation of my ongoing work on Eileen Gray.

And to my family who emphasized the value of education.

Introduction: Exhibition as Publication

“Learning From Eileen Gray” was planned as an exhibition and slated to open on March 20, 2020, at Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan, to coincide with the Eileen Gray retrospective that had opened the previous month. Owing to the pandemic shutdown, the exhibition could not be installed as planned. However, the happy outcome is this publication, which gathers student work culled from seven years of a seminar I taught at the New York Institute of Technology on two houses by Eileen Gray: the villa E.1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, which Gray designed collaboratively with Jean Badovici, and Tempe a Pailla in Castellar, designed independently by Gray for her own use. The seminar and exhibition explored Gray’s design process and emphasized the value of learning through making.

A handful of esteemed scholars have laid the groundwork for research of Eileen Gray’s practice, initiating an ongoing dialogue. These include Caroline Constant and Mary McLeod, whom I interviewed as part of the BGC exhibition.

By introducing a generation of students to Gray’s remarkable work and by presenting this project, I hope to extend the unfolding story of an important architect.

Two years ago a student asked what had drawn me to Eileen Gray’s work. My early response to Gray’s architecture was intuitive—I first came across the villa E.1027 during my undergraduate studies in architecture, and I was struck by the simple, clear vision of a modern house with specific, well-resolved ideas about the layered experience of daily life. Over time, closer study revealed the nuanced complexity of her architecture and the compelling story of Gray’s life.

I first visited the villa E.1027 in June 2000. Gray designed the house with Jean Badovici, a trained architect and editor of the important journal L’Architecture Vivante . The architecture, its built-in components, and furniture were all designed to facilitate a modern way of life through the flexible use and intertwined programming of space. The house sits on the edge of a spectacular cliff on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the south of France. In 2000, the structure was in disrepair, and almost all of the built-ins and furniture that Gray had designed for it had been damaged or sold. Still, Gray’s use of modest means to create complex space was perceptible and extraordinary; the impact of the varied layers of thresholds she had created between the inside and out remained legible.1 I immediately became fascinated by Gray’s work and soon visited Tempe a Pailla, a much less well-known but

equally compelling inland house in Castellar, France, designed by Gray in the 1930s. The two houses respond to different briefs: E.1027 was designed for Jean Badovici, a bachelor who liked sports and to entertain, and Tempe a Pailla, designed for Gray herself, who liked privacy and to do her work.

The fact that Eileen Gray was a female architect practicing in a male-dominated profession in the early twentieth century was not my primary focus. My interest in the work was purely the work itself. Only later, having studied Gray’s practice for an extended period of time, did I focus on the relevance of her biography and its relationship to the architecture. When I began to teach a seminar on Gray’s architecture, I realized that it was important to describe the fascinating backstory of these two houses and to examine it with students.

In 2010, I developed and taught my first seminar on Eileen Gray at the New York Institute of Technology. For two years, the subject of the course was E.1027; then I switched the focus to Tempe a Pailla for two years; and for the following three years, students were given the opportunity to study one of the two houses. Some aspects of the seminar were unusual. First, the entire semester was devoted to a single house, allowing a very detailed examination of Gray’s work. Second, studies of Eileen Gray almost invariably give substantial attention to her contributions to the decorative arts, whereas my seminar was almost exclusively directed to studying Gray’s architecture. Her furniture and built-in components were analyzed, but only as part of the Gesamtkunstwerk , or “total work of art,” of the house. Architectural historian colleagues also pointed out that, as someone who is primarily a practicing architect, I bring a particular perspective to a consideration of Gray’s work.

The underlying premise of the seminar was that the in-depth study of a single component can provide valuable architectonic lessons toward the full understanding of an architect’s practice. To this end, students were asked to select an element of the house, conduct archival research, produce a set of measured drawings, study details in process models, and produce final models. Some of the pieces selected were not well documented, requiring students to extrapolate details and dimensions based on the little information available in order to fully describe the designs. Students developed digital and physical models and became immersed in Eileen Gray’s sophisticated designs. Through detailed analysis and the act of constructing the components of the house, students achieved a more complete understanding of Gray’s sensibility and the complexity of her designs.

Themes of focus in my research of Gray’s work—and in my own architectural practice—have guided studies in the seminar: the economical use of space; flexible and contact-driven built-ins and furniture; material inventiveness; natural environmental systems; and adaptations of vernacular components and details. More than two decades after my first visit to E.1027, Eileen Gray’s work continues to offer valuable lessons.

Jan Greben in Conversation with Caroline Constant and Mary McLeod

Jan Greben: Thank you, Mary and Caroline, for joining in this conversation. You have both made substantial contributions to the field of architectural history, and I’m excited about our dialogue.

How did you become interested in Eileen Gray?

Caroline Constant: In 1975, I saw a very small exhibition of Gray’s work at the Princeton University School of Architecture. Organized by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, it was initially on view in the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles and then traveled to several other venues throughout the country [fig. 1]. Michael Graves arranged to bring the exhibit to Princeton, and he subsequently included images of E.1027 in his theory lectures. I don’t remember the specific contents of the exhibit because I was unfamiliar with her work at the time; it might have included original drawings, but they were more likely reproductions. Although I was instantly drawn to the work of this amazing woman, it took me two decades before I could figure out how to write about it. There was little archival material available at the time, and the archives were poorly organized. In my 1995 essay on E.1027, I discussed Gray’s contribution as “a nonheroic modernism” and analyzed the house as a critical response to Le Corbusier’s “Five Points of a New Architecture.”1

JG: So you were in graduate school at the time of the exhibition?

CC: It was before I started graduate school, when I was working in Dean Robert Geddes’s professional office in Princeton.

Mary McLeod: Sheila de Bretteville came to lecture at Princeton while I was a student. I remember being so taken by her talk—and by her remarkable design work. You can just imagine what it meant to hear an articulate, talented feminist speaking in that male stronghold. But, curiously, I don’t remember seeing the Gray exhibition there at all. It might be because I had just moved to Brooklyn and was desperately trying to finish my design thesis.

I’m almost sure it was Michael Graves who first introduced me to Gray. I don’t know how he discovered her work, most likely from Joseph Rykwert’s articles about Gray in the Architectural Review and Perspecta . 2 Ken Frampton may have alerted him to them while Ken was teaching at Princeton. (There was a very strong British–American exchange at the school in those years.) I remember Michael discussing how architectural details—square versus round columns, the placement of angled or curved walls— might affect our movement in space; he was almost always referring to a design by Le Corbusier, but I suspect it was that same attention to detail and bodily experience that Graves admired in Gray’s work.

After that, I had several other encounters with Gray’s work. I was in Paris in 1976 and 1977, and then almost every summer into the early ’80s. One summer, I think it was ’77, I went to Menton with my former husband, Mark Cigolle, and we walked to Cap-Martin, only to discover that E.1027 was completely boarded up. As I recall, we climbed the fence and were able to get up onto the balcony and did our best to peer through the slats, but, of course, we didn’t see much. Ironically, I was working on my dissertation on Le Corbusier at the time, but I couldn’t find his Cabanon, which was just up the hill. It was so overgrown.

Then, in 1980, there was an Eileen Gray exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized by J. Stewart Johnson, which I went to see. I also bought the catalogue. And in 1981, I read the essay on Gray by Deborah Nevins in an issue of Heresies , titled “Making Room.”3 Heresies was a feminist art collective that invited various groups to edit issues of its journal devoted to particular themes. This one was on architecture. Debby, who was then a graduate student in art history at Columbia, translated Gray and Badovici’s dialogue, “From Eclecticism to Doubt,” and wrote a brief essay introducing her translation. For me, her contribution continued what Sheila had started with her exhibition, making Eileen Gray part of a legacy of women in modernism. (By then, I’d already met Charlotte Perriand—in the summer of 1978, I think—but had not yet written about her.)

I might mention that “Making Room” also included a piece about Lilly Reich. It was written by one of my students, Deborah Dietsch, who had earlier written a student paper about her. These two essays inspired me to encourage students to do more research on early women designers, who had been neglected in the standard histories. Ken Frampton, if I’m remembering correctly, omitted Eileen Gray from his first edition of Modern Architecture (1980). He inserted her name in a later edition but in a rather odd way: for her work in concrete—not exactly Gray’s strong suit, as I discovered as part of the advisory committee on the restoration of E.1027.4

It’s rather shocking how many women designers besides Gray—Charlotte Perriand, Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, and Aino Aalto, to name just a few—were excluded from most of the early histories of modern architecture.

JG: Absolutely.

CC: It was also interesting that Michael Graves had a copy of L’Architecture Vivante devoted to E.1027. It was on permanent loan from Peter Eisenman, who had no interest in Gray’s work. Graves used to discuss the house in his required theory class, using images from the publication.

MM: He developed that class after I graduated. But now it makes sense to me that he was already talking to me about Gray when I was a student—in fact, maybe it was that issue of L’Architecture Vivante that sparked his interest in her work.

I think one can see some of Graves’s affinities with Gray’s approach to architecture in “From Eclecticism to Doubt,” which I assume we’ll discuss later. I should clarify that we’re speaking about the early 1970s, before Graves had gone full-fledged postmodern. At that point, his work was still very much “White” architecture, although with lots of color.5 Of course, Le Corbusier’s villas in the 1920s also had colored walls, primarily in the interiors.

JG: I paired selected images of E.1027 (1926–29) and Tempe a Pailla (1931–35) to prompt a discussion of the comparisons they might elicit [figs. 2 and 3]. I think it’s interesting that the two houses have usually been discussed separately, but I wonder whether these pairings bring any thoughts to mind?

CC: There are two primary differences between these houses. Although both are built in isolated locales, the specific conditions of the sites prompted very different architectural responses. The site for E.1027 comprised a set of terraces planted with lemon trees that overlooked the Mediterranean Sea and was only accessible by footpath. Although Tempe a Pailla was built directly on a rural road, the site contained three cisterns, which Gray chose to preserve and to build within and on top of, thus ensuring a distance between the inhabited spaces and the road. The other difference is that E.1027 was designed, as is stated very clearly in L’Architecture Vivante , for a man who loves entertaining. Its primary function was a means for Badovici to entertain prominent members of the architectural avantgarde, signaling his contribution not only as a spokesman for modern architecture but also as a designer, an active participant in the movement. Gray’s house in Castellar is almost the opposite in terms of its qualities as a living environment. It was designed for a woman living alone, one who had occasional visitors, but with paramount concern for her personal privacy.

MM: I might mention two similarities between the two houses—horizontality and the fact that they’re both embedded in their sites. As Caroline said, the houses are on very different sites, but they both take advantage of their locations in sensitive ways. Two additional similarities are the horizontal windows and Gray’s use of shutters, as well as curtains, to filter light and provide privacy. The rubble walls—some existing, some new—are much more apparent in Tempe a Pailla, but at E.1027 Gray also retained and rebuilt the rough stone walls of the existing terracing.

JG: These two images are quite interesting because, in fact, the one of Tempe a Pailla is not taken from an easily accessible vantage point, but from the lemon grove that Gray owned across the road. So I think this pairing makes the houses look more similar than they actually are.

MM: I think that’s true. In both cases, Gray took advantage of the fruit trees of the region.

Menton is famous for its lemons, and Roquebrune, of course, is right next to Menton, and Castellar is just above it. Lemons are part of the local culture—Menton is where you can buy lemon marmalade and other such items. So, for me, her decision to keep the lemon trees has a special resonance.

JG: I think it’s appealing that Gray wanted to connect to those aspects of the region.

CC: The rubble walls at Tempe a Pailla are really important.

MM: Yes, and somewhat less important to E.1027.

CC: At E.1027 the existing agricultural terraces are supported on rubble walls, and the house is built at a subtle angle to those walls, a difference that is easily perceived from the approach to the house. Tempe a Pailla, in contrast, is built directly on the rubble walls of the cisterns. Gray transformed the first cistern into a combination garage and guest room (or chauffeur’s room, as it is also identified). The second one she used for storage, which is accessible from a stairway concealed beneath the banquette in the entry hall, and the third she retained as a cistern. There was originally a modest farmer’s hut on the site, which she purchased shortly after Badovici bought the property in Roquebrune. She painted the hut white, named it “le bateau blanc” (the white boat), and lived either there or in Menton for roughly three years while E.1027 was being built. After that construction was completed, she tore down the little building and started her own design for the site.

JG: An early aerial photograph of E.1027 that Renaud Barrès included in his essay in the Bard catalogue shows its relationship to the terraces.6 It’s quite intriguing, as you mentioned, Caroline, that one house is aligned with the cisterns and the other one is shifted off the angle of the terraces.

CC: I love that photograph, which was taken before any other houses were built in the vicinity. Barrès describes E.1027 as being like a ship, in part because of that juxtaposition.

MM: E.1027 is much more nautical than Tempe a Pailla in terms of its massing and site but also its colors and motifs, such as the life preserver hanging from the balcony’s tubular frame. And when we discuss the interior, I think we’ll find other differences as well.

JG: Looking at this next pair of photographs of the living rooms in the two houses [figs. 4 and 5], would you discuss some of the distinctions between Gray’s interiors?

CC: A primary difference in the interiors is spatial. The flat ceiling and floor planes at E.1027 contribute to the impression of an abstract spatial continuum. At Tempe a Pailla, however, Gray’s decision to build atop the uneven surfaces of the cistern walls and to extend some of those walls upwards resulted in the varied levels of the floor planes, which she echoed by varying the ceiling heights. Thus, each room is a discrete spatial entity, although the public zone of the house is spatially continuous.

One detail I recall is that she used the space under the open steps that lead from the entry hall/dining room down to the living room/studio as bookcases. She suspended a wooden lattice from the ceiling above the steps, where she stored suitcases. She put every cubic volume to use, and I think that’s really intriguing.

Even though the spatial manipulation at E.1027 is very nuanced, the sensibility at Tempe a Pailla differs. In subtle ways, she accommodated multiple uses throughout.

MM: I agree. Tempe a Pailla is simpler in its appearance than E.1027 but not in terms of its planning and spatial solutions. Here, Gray’s own distinction between “simplicity” and “simplification” seems relevant. The latter, she believed, can be “formulaic” and a rejection of “life.” 7 Looking at these two images, Tempe a Pailla is not as flashy or seductive as E.1027. But, of course, the photo of E.1027 was published in L’Architecture Vivante and was meant to be a publicity image of sorts, showing off Gray’s furniture, rugs, and so forth. I suspect many of the items were added just for the photo shoot. Another possible difference is words. There are labels and phrases all over the place in E.1027: on the rug, on the large map hanging in the living room, on the kitchen cabinets, and on other built-ins. Are there any words at all in Tempe a Pailla?

JG: Not that I have seen.

MM: I haven’t seen any, either. It made me wonder about Frédéric Migayrou’s and Cloé Pitiot’s intriguing comments about Gray’s literary connections.8 Could it be that Gray’s interest in words and puns was only a momentary episode in her work, not an interest she sustained?

CC: I think that’s a really interesting point. I’m not aware of any writing on the walls or built-in furnishings at Tempe a Pailla. Although I made several appointments with the caretaker to visit the house, she consistently made some excuse to turn me down at the last minute, so I have had no direct experience of the interiors.

It has always seemed to me that the inscriptions in Corbusian lettering on the walls and built-in furnishings at E.1027 are indicative of Gray’s sense of humor. Next to the bathroom sink, for example, she wrote “the place for teeth.” I think of them as wry commentaries—on notions of functionalism, perhaps, or on the vagaries of daily life.

But I also think that her use of Corbusian stencils, which I realize were not his invention but instead replicate a form of lettering he borrowed from engineering drawings, ultimately reflects a critique of Le Corbusier’s architectural stance at the time.

E.1027 was a vehicle for Badovici to demonstrate an adherence to modern architectural principles; it was a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art. Badovici was enthralled by Le Corbusier’s work, and he aspired to be understood as a member of the architectural avant-garde. I believe E.1027 is a showpiece toward that end. A number of prominent architects visited him there, including Walter Gropius and Josep Lluís Sert. Tempe a Pailla is the opposite. Despite its intricate interweaving of parts, it is primarily a dwelling—a reflection of Gray’s particular style of living.

JG: It’s much quieter in a way.

MM: To that point, I was told, when we were working on the restoration of E.1027, that almost all the furniture in it was made by the artisans with whom Gray had already worked in Paris; whereas most of the furnishings in Tempe a Pailla were made by local craftsmen. That explains perhaps why they don’t seem as refined or finished.

CC: This distinction seems correct to me. I believe that Gray essentially learned how to build at E.1027 because she worked so closely with the contractors. I think she had great respect for them. I don’t believe that Joseph Charles Roattino, the local carpenter who did so much work at Tempe a Pailla—and who appears in some of Gray’s photographs, such as those of the stool that folds out to become a short stepladder—did any work at E.1027, but she continued working with him to create furnishings for Tempe a Pailla after the construction was completed. Collaboration with contractors and tradesmen was an important aspect of her professional education.

MM: I think that was very common in the decorative arts at the time. Perriand also worked with a group of artisans, whom she repeatedly relied upon. I don’t think she even drew many of her furniture designs in detail before working out with the craftsmen how to fabricate the pieces. It was, of course, still relatively rare in France to mass-produce furniture.

CC: When I was undertaking the research for my book, Mary made the useful suggestion that I spend some time looking into the decorative arts in general. I found that very few women were involved in the decorative arts in France at that time, so that Perriand and Gray reflected a departure from the norm.

MM: That was probably the case until around the 1980s or so, perhaps longer. For the most part, the decorative arts in France, especially furniture design, were dominated by men—think, for example, of the fame of [Émile-Jacques] Ruhlmann and Pierre Chareau. However, there was a school of the decorative arts for women in Paris, the École Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, located in the Pavillon de Marsan, a wing of the Louvre. That was the school Perriand attended. Many of its students ended up working in textiles or on furniture collections for department stores, but it’s likely that many of these women, probably most of them, stopped working once they married and had children. After the devastation of World War I— France lost nearly a million and a half men—the social atmosphere became increasingly conservative, and intensely pronatalist. In some ways, the situation of French

women in the 1920s reminds me of that of American women in the late 1940s and ’50s; after having full-time jobs during the war years, often highly skilled jobs in traditionally male fields, women were expected to stop working to become mothers and housewives.

JG: In relation to your point, Mary, Gray’s position as someone who was financially independent allowed her to continue to focus on her architectural work.

Looking at the window walls and terraces shown in the next two photos [figs. 6 and 7], how would you characterize the relationship between the exterior and interior of the two houses? I think it is interesting, for example, that Gray incorporated a fireplace on the south-facing walls of the living rooms.

CC: This detail of the Tempe a Pailla living room shows Gray combining the fireplace with steps and a landing to create a deep threshold between the living room and the terrace. In L’Architecture Vivante Gray maintained that you should put a fireplace against a window so you can see the glow of the embers against the setting sun. She did that in both houses. Yet putting the entire fireplace in front of the window at Tempe a Pailla is a more radical idea. Stewart Johnson told me that when he went to Tempe a Pailla he didn’t realize that there was a fireplace, because its presence was concealed by the metal door that covered its face during the summer.

MM: You wouldn’t know it was there.

JG: Especially with the shelves for displaying objects in front of the chimney.

MM: Gray’s asymmetrical handling of the fireplace reminds me of Le Corbusier’s fireplace at Maison La Roche, which also has a window above it, although in that case the fireplace and window are part of an interior wall that separates the landing of the gallery from the library; the window isn’t centered on the fireplace but shears it in half—for me, a gesture that explicitly rejects the traditional hearth. Gray, too, seems like she wanted to minimize the presence of the fireplace at Tempe a Pailla, if in a quieter, less overtly mannered way. The hearth is certainly not the central focus of a room, as it might be in a Frank Lloyd Wright interior.

CC: At the same time every element at Tempe a Pailla has multiple functions, more so than at E.1027.

MM: I think that aspect of Gray’s work has to be emphasized. It was something that both Sheila de Bretteville and Deborah Nevins also noted in their comments about Gray’s work.9 The only other person I can think of during that period who was as committed to multiple uses of domestic spaces and objects is Trüus SchröderSchräder, who collaborated with Gerrit Rietveld on the design of the Schröder House. I’m always hesitant to generalize about gender and architecture—for fear of any implications of essentialism—but it’s interesting that we find this same concern for multi-functionalism in the work of several early women designers, perhaps owing to their personal experience or training: for example, Perriand’s layout of the furnishings of the Loucheur house interior, in which spaces convert from daytime usage to nighttime sleeping arrangements; or Grete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt kitchen, with its foldaway ironing board and combination cutting board/waste bin. Gray, though, takes this preoccupation with multiple uses to an extreme. The fireplace is one more example.

CC: Another example is the banquette on the terrace, one side of which is a clerestory window that admits natural light to the room below.

MM: For me, the relationship between exterior and interior, and the sense of spatial continuity between them, is quite different in the two houses. On the lower level of E.1027, there are terraces and outdoor living areas, but no major interior spaces. And on the upper level of E.1027, where the major living area and bedroom are, the exterior space along the Mediterranean side seems more like a corridor or balcony than a space to be occupied. The terrace at Tempe a Pailla is much larger and seems like a direct continuation of the living room. The fact that Gray designed a built-in banquette and then later placed her wooden deck chair there, I think, is indicative.

CC: The proportions of the terrace at Tempe a Pailla make it much more of an outdoor room than the terrace at E.1027. The wall segment with sliding shutters add to this roomlike quality. Furthermore, there are three distinct ways to gain access to the terrace without going into the house, which enable it to be used in a manner independent of the interior: a bridge that leads from the garden and passes over the public footpath; a staircase that rises from the gate at the level of the road; and a horizontal passage that leads directly from the footpath, next to the door to the entry foyer/dining room. I imagine it would be used in a completely different way from the terrace at E.1027.

MM: At E.1027, the balcony might be a place where one steps outside to savor the view of the sea or perhaps to have a cigarette, but it’s hardly a space to spend much time in. But there is one photo in L’Architecture Vivante that shows the dining table there—it barely fits.

Certain features of the terrace at Tempe a Pailla remind me of Le Corbusier’s terraces at the Villa Garches and the Villa Savoye, which also extend the dining/living areas, although Gray’s terrace is more intimate and includes more built-in features. At Garches, there’s also a concrete canopy covering part of the space and at Savoye, a strip of outdoor windows on an exterior wall, though without Gray’s shutters offering privacy and sun control.

CC: One thing Gray avoided doing was to design a roof terrace that wasn’t connected to an indoor space. Although the roof at E.1027 is accessible, it is not an occupiable space. I think it was an important principle for Gray—that a terrace was a space to be used in conjunction with an interior.

JG: This next pair of images shows the work spaces at E.1027 and Tempe a Pailla [figs. 8 and 9]. How would you characterize their differences?

MM: Caroline, what do you think about the upper horizontal window in Tempe a Pailla?

CC: This strip window high above the work table is equipped with movable slats— I believe they are aluminum—to control the western sun. There are hardly any other windows on this side of the house, which adjoins the public footpath, so privacy was an obvious concern. This façade also has several small round apertures with elements set within them that can be adjusted to magnify the natural light entering the space, such as the toilet and the pantry.

JG: And in the dining room.

CC: At E.1027 the work space is part of the bedroom, and at Tempe a Pailla it is part of the living room. I think this is a marked difference.

MM: I was curious about the art in Tempe a Pailla. The prints or gouaches above the radiator and Gray’s desk—are they by her?

CC: Yes. She continued to make prints and other art works throughout her life. Jennifer Goff discusses this aspect of Gray’s creative output in her book on Eileen Gray.10

MM: Before Le Corbusier made his murals, were there any paintings hanging on the walls at E.1027?

CC: No, just the map of the Caribbean that was mounted on the living-room wall, which she inscribed with her enigmatic phrases. Gray seems to have been fascinated by faraway places. At Tempe a Pailla she hung a plan of the pre-Columbian ruins at Teotihuacán in the entry foyer/dining room, indicating her more relaxed approach to the relationship between art and architecture. She took this casual attitude further at her last house, Lou Pérou, where she hung a map of Peru over the fireplace and incorporated simple chairs she purchased from a local store.

JG: There is much more emphasis, as everyone’s saying, on having a place to work at Tempe a Pailla. Her work space is more substantial. I imagine it would be an inspiring place to work.

MM: Yes, it’s bigger. Obviously, Gray was working while staying at Tempe a Pailla, as Caroline said earlier. Even though Tempe a Pailla and E.1027 are both vacation or summer homes, I think Badovici saw E.1027—as did Gray when she was designing it—more as a place for entertaining guests.

CC: I have a hard time imagining Badovici seated at the work table at E.1027 and actually making drawings—so many of his extant drawings are rough sketches.

MM: Perhaps he wrote there, but I agree.

JG: Can we discuss the bedrooms at both houses, as seen in this next pair of images [figs. 10 and 11]?

MM: The bedroom at Tempe a Pailla is so much simpler. And there are no furs. Are there other photos that include them? Animal skins were a common feature, almost a cliché, in many modernist interiors of the period. Perriand and Lilly Reich used them as well. I assume they were meant to soften modernism, with its hard metal and glass surfaces. Again, Gray used a beautiful quilted bed cover, but no fur. Also no rugs. Are there any in other photos?

JG: Not that I am aware of. It’s much more pared down.

CC: I am intrigued by the spatial differences between E.1027 and Tempe a Pailla. In the bedroom at Tempe a Pailla, for example, the floor plane of the sleeping area, seen in this image, is several inches below that for the dressing area. There is a greater emphasis on horizontal continuity at E.1027. I have always been intrigued by the way Gray positioned the living room carpets at E.1027 so that they overlap the zones created by the markedly different tones of the floor tiles. This makes the floor appear to be multilayered without the physical changes in level found at Tempe a Pailla. The layering of space at Tempe a Pailla is more architectural, more tangible.

MM: Gray seems to have used level changes more at Tempe a Pailla, in part (as Caroline noted) because of the site. At E.1027, in contrast, it seems that she was consciously overlapping spaces and intentionally avoiding symmetry and any sense of centrality or stasis. Even the round rug in the living room is divided down the middle, with the central line placed diagonally to the space. She was very insistent on this modern sense of spatial flow. It’s there in Tempe a Pailla, but not to the same degree. The bedroom in Tempe a Pailla is not a static room, but it’s so much simpler.

Does the bed at Tempe a Pailla have mosquito netting?

CC: Yes, because there is no tradition of incorporating screens in the windows, mosquito netting was necessary. You can see the mechanism to the right of the bed.

JG: How would you compare the organization and layout of the two houses, in the as-built plans drawn by Stefan Hecker and Christian F. Müller [figs. 12 and 13]?

CC: I am not aware of any complete plans of Tempe a Pailla in Gray’s archives, which seems odd if it is true. Some of the archival material only became available after I completed my research.

MM: Do any of Gray’s plans show the lower guest room and the cistern or the garage, Caroline?

CC: A composite drawing of the garage and guest room was included in the Bard exhibition. I discuss it in the catalogue. It’s very hard to read the drawing because the lines are very light and its composition differs from her other composite drawings of rooms, in which the elevations are projected directly from the plans.

JG: I am interested in the angles in the as-built plans of the two houses published by Hecker and Müller. In each house an adjustment was made on the entry side. This could have happened for a variety of reasons. I find it notable that Gray made these adjustments, since her original intention, based on her drawings of E.1027, seems to have been an orthogonal layout.

CC: There is an important distinction to be made here. Because none of Gray’s drawings of E.1027 indicate the canted angle of the entry façade, I imagine that this could have been either an accident or an adjustment that was made during construction. The angle was first revealed in Jean-Paul Rayon’s measured drawings of the house, which he published in 1975.11 I don’t think she intended it. You really can’t tell when you’re in the space that the façade is at an angle. In the case of

Tempe a Pailla, however, whereas Gray’s initial plan studies indicate an orthogonal layout, her subsequent, more detailed plan drawings include the canted walls of the entry façade. In this case I believe she made the adjustment to accommodate the existing conditions of both the public footpath and the existing cistern walls.

MM: I wondered if it was due to foundation issues.

CC: Exactly. I haven’t looked carefully at the plans of the existing conditions at E.1027 in relation to the locations of the columns. Certain archival drawings might clarify this question. I don’t think that the difference between her plan drawings and the built reality is terribly meaningful in this case, but I could be wrong.

The plan adjustments at Tempe a Pailla are far more significant. I haven’t seen a plan of the existing cisterns, though I do remember a plan of Tempe a Pailla in which she blackened in the walls and left the columns blank. That particular drawing affords an insight into her intentions for the structural system, which is rarely visible in the spaces, since she buried most of the columns in the walls. She obviously wasn’t trying to express a columnar grid in the layout of either house, but I think it is interesting that at Tempe a Pailla she left a shallow horizontal strip in the street façade open to expose the relationship between the concrete columns and the cistern walls.

JG: Your feeling is that the canted entry wall is much more intentional in Tempe a Pailla?

CC: It’s intentional in that she adapted her layout to the angle of the adjoining public footpath as well as the location of the cistern walls to develop a more subtle interplay

of elements than at E.1027, but I’m not sure what’s behind the intention other than accommodating the existing situation. One could possibly read more into it.

MM: In any case, these are very subtle angles in contrast to the angles in her Vacation Center (1936–37), or even to the furniture arrangement in Badovici’s apartment, where she placed the bed at a 45-degree angle.

CC: There was also a pre-existing canted wall in Badovici’s Paris apartment— a project for which she is given sole design credit—but she obscured its existence by stepping the storage units along that wall.

JG: Thinking about these two houses in the context of shifting modern architectural principles in the 1920s and 1930s, would you assign some of the differences between E.1027 and Tempe a Pailla to the changes that were seen in the architecture of the time, changes also seen in the work of Charlotte Perriand?

CC: We might have different answers to this question. I believe there has been a tendency in the U.S. to associate the architecture of the modern movement with the formal qualities derived from Le Corbusier’s “Five Points of a New Architecture.” This is evident in Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s curation of the “Modern Architecture” exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Yet by the early 1930s a critical reassessment of those ideas was already under way, which is reflected in the work of Le Corbusier, among others. The thing I love about Le Corbusier is how self-critical he was, how he was perpetually working on ideas in fresh new ways. Consider the more “humane” approach to modern movement precepts in the work of Scandinavian architects Alvar Aalto, Gunnar Asplund, and Sigurd Lewerentz. It struck me when I lived in Sweden in the 1990s that the Scandinavian concept of functionalism—a term that was shunned by American architects at the time—was still a motivating idea. It was affiliated with the human qualities of inhabitation that Gray addressed in her dialogue with Badovici and that Mary associates with Michael Graves’s teaching. I’m not trying to argue that Gray was following the work of these Scandinavian modernists, but she did admire

Le Corbusier’s openness to change, as she noted in a postcard of 1961 to her niece, Prunella Clough.12

In The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture , Colin St. John Wilson addresses the diverse strands of modernism that were occurring in Europe in the late 1930s and beyond. He includes E.1027 in that discussion, and he compares it to Le Corbusier’s house for Madame de Mandrot, noting that his client abandoned it as unlivable.13

MM: I would agree completely with Caroline that there was a general shift in European modern architecture in the 1930s, and that a critical reassessment was under way. We really do need to contextualize Gray’s own change in orientation, both socially and formally, from this perspective, even if she always did things her own way (and even if she anticipated in some ways this critical reassessment in “From Eclecticism to Doubt” [1929]). In general, I see Le Corbusier’s own formal shift in the 1930s taking two different directions: one is toward the use of more rustic or organic forms and materials—his use of rubble and wood, and of local construction techniques; the other might be seen as involving a more realistic engagement with new technology, such as his use of metal panels and lightweight construction.14 Likewise, I think Gray’s work in the 1930s has this double-sided quality, though it’s not necessarily as visible at Tempe a Pailla, where the rustic dimensions dominate. But perhaps you can see it in the coffee table [fig. 14] , which according to the Bard catalogue was designed a bit later, in 1935. The free-form wooden top is more rustic, one might say “organic,” whereas the metal framework is lighter than the chromed or nickel-plated supports of her furnishings from the 1920s. This interest in new materials and technology is most apparent in Gray’s strange Ellipse House (1935), which was to be made of lightweight, prefabricated concrete panels, and in her earlier camping tent (1930), designed with Jean Badovici. Both projects were intended for mass-production, and she hoped they would be affordable to working-class people.

But this shift in orientation was not unique to Gray and Le Corbusier. For example, Marcel Breuer gave a talk to the Swiss Werkbund in 1934 in which he paid homage to vernacular architecture. After he left the Bauhaus, he took a bicycle tour of

southern France and saw Le Corbusier’s Mandrot house. Despite its leaking roof, it seems to have made a big impression on him, and he too began to use rubble walls in the 1930s.15

CC: Do you recall the date of the Villa de Mandrot?

MM: 1930–31. Le Corbusier’s project for the Errazuriz house in Chile, also of 1930, is even more rustic; it has rough-hewn timber supports and an interior rubble wall and floor. But these projects weren’t published until 1934, in the second volume of the Oeuvre complète , and I’m not sure Gray would have known about them.

JG: Can we speak about Eileen Gray’s interest in work that would have a social impact and any projects that have this focus? You discuss this idea in one chapter of your book, Caroline.

CC: First of all, let me say that I think Gray’s conjectural projects are a significant aspect of her architectural production, and I wish more people were working on this material. My book is now more than twenty years old, and I had hoped that it would prompt further research in this area.

This body of Gray’s work, which is primarily hypothetical, could be considered to begin with the camping tent of 1930–31, which Gray designed with Badovici. She had a related interest in minimal housing, in minimal space. I believe she identified the housekeeper’s room at E.1027 as a minimum cell, and when she and Badovici published E.1027 in the inaugural issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui , they identified it only as “La maison minimum” (the minimum house).16 She developed numerous studies of minimal housing that most likely date from the early 1930s, as well as the Ellipse House (1936), intended for prefabrication, as Mary noted, and the Vacation Center (1936–37). These proposals are all associated with the social policies of the Popular Front, which gave French workers in certain categories the right to leisure time. The government subsidized train tickets, for example, to make weekend and holiday travel affordable. Gray’s Cultural Center of 1946–47 is also interesting in

this regard. It was first published ten years later, after André Malraux, as France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs, began his efforts to encourage the French youth to remain in the provinces by fostering widespread cultural endeavors.

MM: I have a question, Caroline. On my last birthday, as you know, I received a wonderful present, a book of essays written by friends (including you); in Tim Benton’s essay on Gray, he quotes a passage from an unpublished document titled “Urbanisme,” in which Gray calls for a separate district for artists and intellectuals. She seems to be suggesting that they need to be protected from the rough-andtumble of ordinary urban life. What comes out in this little fragment is almost a fear of public space. It’s curious to me because she lived in Paris for much of her life. How might one reconcile her interest in social issues and commitment to collective programs during the 1930s with this seemingly anti-public stance? I just can’t put these two disparate sides of her together, although perhaps it has to do with her own personal yearnings for privacy. I sense, on the one hand, an almost elitist sensibility that is probably related to her class—as far as I know she always had a housekeeper—and, on the other hand, a genuine sympathy for the needs of workers and a sincere support of the social programs of the Popular Front.

CC: That’s an interesting observation. I believe it’s not uncommon for there to be a difference between one’s personal situation and one’s political viewpoint. Prunella Clough read a draft of an essay in which I related Gray’s conjectural proposals of the 1930s and 1940s to the political initiatives of the Popular Front, and she said it definitely resonated with her understanding of Gray’s political stance. That was reassuring to me because I feel as though much of my work on Eileen Gray is highly speculative, which means that subsequent scholars could prove me wrong—and this has indeed happened. I have no problem with that, but I think that many who work in this area of scholarship don’t realize they’re going out on a limb with their speculations, some of which could never be proven one way or the other. So, I was relieved when Prunella confirmed that my instincts about Gray’s political ideology were correct.

I also think that Gray was fundamentally a very reserved and private person. She could live a more anonymous private life in Paris but had a very different life in the countryside, where privacy was assured in a different way. Jennifer Goff would be much better at addressing this dichotomy than I am. She really understands Gray as a human being.

JG: What do you think Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici were suggesting by the title for their dialogue, “From Eclecticism to Doubt”?

MM: I’m not sure, if it was you, Jan, or you, Caroline, who first said this, but it’s almost as if a third term is missing from the title. If “eclecticism” represents her earlier work in the decorative arts and “doubt” her position in 1929, might the third or middle term be “functionalism” or “standardization”? And is it really “doubt” that she is proposing? I kept wondering that when I was rereading the dialogue. For me, she’s clearly calling for architecture that embraces both thinking and feeling, scientific rigor and personal sentiment. I don’t sense she’s all that doubtful. I’m curious, Caroline, what you think. It’s something that’s puzzled me.

CC: I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to that question, which is what makes it so interesting. To me, “eclecticism” could also refer to the design traditions of the nineteenth century, without any reference to Gray at all.

MM: Yes. That might make more sense.

CC: Then the title could be understood as skipping over modern architecture entirely in favor of the direct juxtaposition of nineteenth-century eclecticism to doubt about modern architecture, or doubt about where architecture might be headed. But I am convinced that what is most important is that we cannot pin down what she meant by those words with any precision. It bothers me that so many of us only credit Gray with the ideas expressed in the dialogue. The title is itself dialogic. As Sarah Whiting elaborates in the catalogue to the Eileen Gray exhibitions held at Harvard and the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt (in 1995 and 1996), a dialogue is not meant to lead to concrete conclusions. Its meaning is open-ended.17 The point of a dialogue is to inspire readers to draw their own conclusions. That is why I think it’s interesting to talk about what the words might mean, to raise alternate interpretations, but I don’t think we’ll ever be able to determine Gray’s and Badovici’s intentions with any certainty.

JG: I agree with you. I like the idea of the subject remaining open-ended and unresolved.

CC: What this particular dialogue accomplishes, I think, is to challenge conventional understandings of modern spatial practices with an argument that’s more highly nuanced. Even though the dialogue introduces the role of emotion, for example, it also addresses an intellectual approach to emotion. It’s not a question of emotion or intellect. Gray never engaged in that polarized sort of logic.

MM: I agree, although I also think she was clear in her criticism of modernist dogma. She rejected any reductive understanding of modern architecture, based solely on standardization and rationalization, even if she also saw these strategies as useful ways to reduce costs. Instead, she seemed to be seeking what she called an “organic unity” of all the diverse aspects of a project. Later, in Space, Time and Architecture (1941), Sigfried Giedion would call for a unity of “thinking” and “feeling,” believing that the latter had too often been overlooked in modern society. I sense that Gray was suggesting something similar, when she insisted on the “spontaneous gesture.”18

JG: Could you comment on Eileen Gray’s unconventional definition of type, included in the following quotation?

To me a maison type is only a house whose construction has been realized according to the best and the least costly technical means and whose architecture achieves the maximum perfection for a given situation; that is to say it is a model, not to be reproduced ad infinitum, but that will inspire the construction of other houses in the same spirit.19

MM: It’s clear that Gray didn’t want to reduce the word “type” to “prototype,” that is, a design intended for mass-production. What’s curious to me is how close her understanding of type seems to be to that of Quatremère de Quincy’s, although I’m fairly sure she would not have known his work. For the eighteenth-century theorist, type—as opposed to model—is not something you copy literally but is an idea underlying a design. Gray wasn’t as abstract in her thinking as he was (nor did she make his distinction between type and model) but, like him, she saw type not as something to be duplicated but rather as inspiration for other designs.

It’s probably important to note, as Caroline did earlier, that the dialogue is by both Gray and Badovici, so some of these ideas may be Badovici’s. Tim Benton said there’s a manuscript describing the house in the Getty archives in Badovici’s hand, but not one of the dialogue. At the moment, we don’t know how the dialogue was written—if Badovici recorded Gray’s answers to his questions or vice versa; it might also be that one of them drafted the manuscript individually based on their conversations.

CC: A lot of her work was destroyed during World War II.

JG: Do you want to talk about the Vézelay houses?

CC: It was Peter Adam who introduced the idea of Gray doing work in Vézelay. Badovici’s first house in Vézelay was a commission for his Parisian neighbor, the painter Yves Renaudin. Inspired by Peter Adam’s often erroneous assumptions, I went to Vézelay, and the people who were living in the Renaudin house—the mayor of Vézelay—and in the Badovici house seemed to be convinced that Eileen Gray had worked on these designs. Now that is only circumstantial evidence, but there are also several sketch plans for these houses in Gray’s archive at the V&A [Victoria and Albert Museum] in London.

MM: That’s certainly suggestive.

CC: When I was in Vézelay, I also saw some drawings in a private archive, which came from the attic of the Badovici house. I wasn’t able to make copies of the things that I saw, and some of them may now be in the collection of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. I just assumed that the drawings were by Eileen Gray, but I didn’t have an opportunity to study them carefully or to compare them to her other drawings. When I subsequently went to the Getty, I saw several other drawings, maybe by Badovici, possibly by Gray, or possibly by both of them.

The plan drawings of the Renaudin house and the Badovici house in Gray’s archive at the V&A include flexible furniture, a quality that characterizes some of Gray’s fittings for E.1027 at the same time. This is why I think that Gray had a role to play in Vézelay. Whether she actually did these drawings, I am uncertain, but I can’t prove that Badovici did them either.

JG: What are your thoughts about the pair of watercolor drawings that were included in the Bard exhibition, one of which is included here [fig. 15]?

CC: In the exhibition I believe that the small pair of composite drawings was attributed to Gray, or perhaps to Gray and Badovici. They are watercolors, and they indicate earlier versions of the design that were not executed. Mary has suggested that they could be by Renaudin and Badovici. I think that makes sense, because Renaudin painted in watercolor and I don’t know of any architectural drawings that Gray did in watercolor. She often used gouache, but that involves a different manipulation of the medium. So I don’t think we know for certain who did these drawings.

I remain convinced that Gray played a role in Vézelay, but I can’t prove it. More archival material has become available since I did my research, and Tim Benton is working on this question. I think he has a really good eye for these things, so I look forward to what he finds.

MM: It’s such a puzzle. I went to Vézelay with Tim in 2015, and at one of the houses Badovici renovated (the Artists’ housing), we saw a family album with photographs and various memorabilia, but no drawings. Tim has done considerable research since then. It makes sense to me that Eileen Gray might have been involved with some of the interiors, since Badovici relied on her for his own apartment design.

CC: I believe she did some furniture for Badovici’s house, including a black brick screen that was painted rather than lacquered—although Tim Benton has recently challenged her role in producing it. He has also argued that Eileen Gray couldn’t have gone to Vézelay because Badovici had so many girlfriends there, which we know to be true. But Gray traveled with Badovici and his girlfriend to Mexico in 1934, and her weavers occupied the garage of Badovici’s Artists’ housing in Vézelay after they moved out of the Paris studio; this must have been during the war. Whatever their relationship had been, it was certainly no longer intimate by the late 1920s. As with so many questions about Gray, we will probably never have proof one way or the other.

MM: In any case, Gray remained close to Badovici throughout his life and even gave him money from time to time, despite his numerous relationships with women.

In her book on Gray, Caroline speculates that the louvered-shutter system of Christian Zervos’s house in the Hameau de la Goulette, just outside Vézelay, looks something like the one at E.1027, and Tim and I both thought there was a resemblance when we visited the house.20 The window system at E.1027 is patented in Badovici’s name, but I assume Gray and Badovici discussed it together.

CC: Although the window patent was issued in Badovici’s name, the patent drawing reproduced in L’Architecture Vivante attributes the design to “E. Gray et J. Badovici.”

JG: I’m very interested in the windows at both E.1027 and Tempe a Pailla, as a subject in themselves. I think they’re fascinating.

CC: They are so unlike the way Le Corbusier treated his windows—as a means to frame a view. For Gray, the window was a layered membrane that enabled the occupant to manipulate her exposure to the world beyond or to the sun or the breezes. She accomplished this through a combination of operable panes, shutters that pivot vertically and slide horizontally, and an inner layer of curtains. Although Le Corbusier used curtains on the windows at his mother’s house in Vevey, they were not conceived of as an integral component of the window.

JG: Gray’s two houses are also quite different in section. Tempe a Pailla is more sectionally complex.

CC: It’s very complex, but I believe she relied on working with contractors to achieve three-dimensional resolution, rather than working her designs out through drawings. I can’t prove that, however.

MM: I’m actually puzzled by Gray’s drawings because some of the sketches look quite primitive to me, almost like student drawings, and others, such as these plans with solar indications, are exquisite. I can’t quite put the sensibilities together. I wish we knew a little more about her relationship with Adrienne Gorska, whom Peter Adam says gave her architectural drawing lessons.21

CC: I never saw anything about Gorska in the archives, but I haven’t seen all of the material that is currently available.

MM: Curiously, Gorska herself seems to be a bit of a mystery, even though she built quite a bit and her work was published in the 1930s. Another little research project for future scholars.

CC: I think this sort of research is easier now when you can often take digital pictures on your phone of archival materials. When I was working in Gray’s archive at the V&A, I could see only three drawings at a time, so it was difficult to relate them to one another except through photographic reproductions. That may still be true.

I think a closer comparison of the drawings and photographic material in the different archives would yield some insights. I never saw all the parts of Peter Adam’s collection that are now in Dublin, and that’s an enormous amount of material. You’ve been there, Jan?

JG: I have but material has been added since I was there. I want to go back.

Should we talk about the relevance of Eileen Gray today?

CC: I think this is a really difficult question to answer. My impression of what’s going on in the profession of architecture, as well as in architecture schools in Boston at least, is that there is such a focus on the potential of working with routers and with new types of technical equipment or new materials that any social motivation has

been eclipsed. I find little of interest when I look through the professional journals. The demonstrations that took place last summer under the rubric of “Black Lives Matter” and the associated student’s demands for rethinking curriculum and faculty makeup, which I’m certain is also happening at your schools, seem to have had a bigger effect on scholarship than on design. I have long hoped that the social dimension of architecture might become important again, but in a way that engages the complexity of the issues as we now understand them. The discipline of landscape architecture seems to have been far more concerned with the social dimension of design over the past few decades. We need to think of the design disciplines as problem-stating rather than problem-solving endeavors. I think Gray could become more important in the future, but right now I don’t think her work has much relevance to what is going on in architecture.

MM: I wonder how Gray would feel about digital design, as much as she was open to new technology and different forms of representation. One of the things that’s troubled me, especially in the early years of “paperless studios” at Columbia, was that students, in their exhilaration with geometric manipulation, didn’t seem to think about what it might be like to experience the spaces in their plans, which were often drawn only after a series of 3D renderings—that is, considering what it might be like to enter the buildings they designed or to move through them. Nor were issues like public versus private or urban context often considered. There was such an emphasis on creating interesting forms that the subtle distinctions that mark Gray’s work were completely overlooked. Fortunately, I sense that some of this initial infatuation with digital geometries has died down. For me, Gray’s attention to the experience of habitation and the daily rituals of living—one senses she thought about this continually as she was drawing—is still very relevant; it’s a kind of timeless model for students and architects alike. In a way, I feel fortunate that I began studying architecture when we still drew by hand—it gave you more time to think as you designed, even if drafting could sometimes become tedious; it was so slow.

Of course, we might flip the question and ask why Gray has become almost a commercial commodity? Think of the numerous exhibitions, films, books, furniture reproductions, let alone her original furniture pieces selling for astronomical prices. Didn’t her “Dragon” armchair go for something like 28 million dollars? I believe it was a record price for a piece of twentieth-century furniture. She’s no longer omitted in the history books and survey courses. What does this mean? Why is she suddenly so fashionable, while at the same time her work and approach to design seem so removed from what architecture students are doing in studio?

It concerns me, as much as I’ve struggled for women designers’ greater recognition. It’s almost as if discovering or paying tribute to women designers has become a fashion in itself. Gray was a very talented designer, regardless of her sex or gender identity.

CC: When I gave my presentation at the Bard symposium last year, I showed an image of the books that were available on Gray when I started my research. There were three of them. My next slide depicted a small portion of the books that are currently available through Amazon. She’s become fashionable in the publishing world as well. There will always be an element of speculation about her life and accomplishments. I am guilty of that myself. At the same time there’s so much more archival material available now, and I hope it can be scrutinized with less concern for the fashionable aspects of her production and greater concern for scholarly rigor.

MM: I couldn’t agree more. I also think in terms of feminist architecture history we’re at another stage than we were twenty or thirty years ago. We don’t need to turn Gray into either a tragic victim or some kind of hero—or should I say heroine—who was singularly responsible for her work. We should be able to accept that aspects of her work might be collaborative, even if there’s little doubt that she’s largely responsible for E.1027. This doesn’t diminish her remarkable accomplishments. It’s also time, I believe, to correct some of the numerous historical inaccuracies— especially about Le Corbusier’s murals at E.1027—which have been repeated again and again. And I say this not liking those murals at all, although, paradoxically, the one that disturbed me least, the graffito beneath the house, was the subject of the most serious attack. It’s recently been removed since apparently very little of what was there was Le Corbusier’s original work.

CC: Tim Benton has published an excellent article addressing some of the inaccuracies in those early analyses of the graffito beneath the house.22

JG: It doesn’t diminish Gray to acknowledge that she collaborated with Jean Badovici.

MM: Or that in the decorative arts she collaborated with others too.

CC: Furniture makers and lacquer artists, as well as contractors and tradesmen for the architecture.

MM: Or with Evelyn Wyld, on the fabrication of her rugs.

JG: Clearly, Gray had a great respect for people with expertise, and she valued collaboration.

Thank you both. I think this has been a most informative conversation.

1 Caroline Constant, “E.1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, no. 3 (1994): 265–79.

2 Joseph Rykwert, “Two Houses and an Interior, 1926–33,” Perspecta, no. 13/14 (1971): 66–73; and Joseph Rykwert, “Eileen Gray: Pioneer of Design,” Architectural Review 152, no. 910 (December 1972): 357–61. Frampton and Graves may have also been familiar with Rykwert’s earlier article, “Un Omaggio a Eileen Gray: Pioniera del design,” published in Domus, no. 469 (December 1968): 26–27, 33–46.

3 Deborah F. Nevins, “Eileen Gray” and “From Eclecticism to Doubt: An Interview with Eileen Gray by Jean Badovici,” trans. Deborah F. Nevins, “Making Room: Women and Architecture,” Heresies, no. 11 (1981): 68–71, 71–72.

4 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 334. Curiously, Frampton also added Charlotte Perriand to his new list of contributors to “French lightweight ferrovitreous construction.”

5 Michael Graves, along with other members of the “New York Five,” was part of the group called the “Whites,” who were often juxtaposed in the 1970s to the “Grays,” such as Robert Venturi and Charles Moore.

6 Renaud Barrès, “E 1027 Maison en bord de mer, 1926–29,” in Eileen Gray, ed. Cloé Pitiot and Nina Stritzler-Levine, exh. cat. (New York: Bard Graduate Center; Paris: Centre Pompidou; Dublin: National Museum of Ireland, 2020), 186.

7 Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, “De l’éclectisme au doute,” in “E.1027: Maison en bord de mer,” L’Architecture Vivante (Paris: Éditions Albert Morancé, 1929), 7.

8 Cloé Pitiot, “Crossing Borders,” and Frédéric Migayrou, “The Imagist,” in Eileen Gray, ed. Pitiot and Stritzler-Levine, 34–35, 61–75.

9 Sheila Levrant de Brettville, poster for the Eileen Gray exhibition at the Woman’s Building, quoted in Susana Torre, “Women in Architecture and the New Feminism,” in Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, ed. Susana Torre (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977), 160.

10 Jennifer Goff, Eileen Gray: Her Work and Her World (Sallins: Irish Academic Press, 2015).

11 Jean-Paul Rayon, “Eileen Gray: Un Manifeste 1926/29.” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no. 37 (November 1975): 49–57.

12 Gray wrote, “Was fascinated by the Photos and account of Corbu’s monastery, the first photos I have seen. No one has seen it as yet in Paris. What a vitality in that man and how much he has learnt from working in India.” Postcard from Eileen Gray to Prunella Clough, December 1961. National Museum of Ireland, NMIEG 2000.189.

13 Colin St. John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project (London: Academy Editions, 1995), 102–21.

14 During the 1930s, the rustic and more vernacular dimension of Le Corbusier’s work is most apparent in the series of small houses that he and Pierre Jeanneret did from 1930 to 1935, whereas his involvement new forms of technology can be seen, for example, in their projects for the Ferme radieuse (1934) and the École volante (1940), the latter done in collaboration with Jean Prouvé.

15 Marcel Breuer’s talk, titled “Where Do We Stand?,” was published in the Architectural Review 77, no. 461 (April 1935): 133–36. For an account of Breuer’s visit to the Mandrot house and his interest in the vernacular, see Barry Bergdoll’s excellent essay, “Encountering America: Marcel Breuer and the Discourses of the Vernacular from Budapest to Boston,” in Marcel Breuer: Architecture and Design (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2003), 260–307.

16 Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, “La maison minimum,” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 1, no. 1 (November 1930): inset following p. 64.

17 Sarah Whiting, “Voices Between the Lines: Talking in the Gray Zone,” in Eileen Gray: An Architecture for All Senses, ed. Caroline Constant and Wilfried Wang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Frankfurt: Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 1996), 72–83.

18 Gray and Badovici, “De l’éclectisme au doute,” L’Architecture Vivante, 6.

19 Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, “From Eclecticism to Doubt,” trans. Caroline Constant, in Caroline Constant, Eileen Gray (London: Phaidon, 2000), Appendix IV, 240 [emphasis in original].

20 Constant, Eileen Gray, 86.

21 Peter Adam, Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 88.

22 Tim Benton, “E-1027 and the Drôle de Guerre,” AA Files 74 (2017): 123–43.

Seminar Projects

The eleven projects documented in the following pages were produced by students in the Eileen Gray seminar I taught for seven years, between 2010 and 2019, at the New York Institute of Technology. The components range in scale from the façades of the houses to interior rooms to individual pieces of furniture. The detailed studies examine the concept, function, materials, and context of each component or piece of furniture.

1. North Façade Shutters Natalie Jaggernauth / Spring 2010

Shutters of this type are found throughout E.1027 and are also placed along the southern and eastern façades. They are particularly interesting because of the way they operate. The shutters, originally made of wood with metal hinges, slide on metal tracks in front of the windows, and two of the shutter panels have a section that pivots outward.

2. Guest Room Armoire Jung Yun Kim / Spring 2010

This armoire at E.1027, made of wood painted black and white, has an L-shaped form containing two parts. The long section has glass shelves above the hanging rod for hats and a panel that separates the closet into two parts. Horizontal glass panels at the left divide the space into shelves, and below the closet are two rows, each with three spaces for shoes. On the corner between the two parts are three pivoting drawers. The radiator is covered by a white screen.

3. Filing and Tool Cabinet Ruting Li / Spring 2011

The original filing and tool storage cabinet in the study off the main bedroom at E.1027 was made with perforated sheet metal. It is interesting not only because of the beautiful perforations, but also because of the variations in the perforations. One elevation drawing and two images of this storage unit were published. The relative length and width of the cabinet were determined on the basis of the elevation drawing, and the dimensions were scaled from the photographs.

Perforated Metal File Storage Cabinet

Perforated Metal File Storage Cabinet

MODEL PHOTOGRAPHS

MODEL PHOTOGRAPHS

4. Transat Chair Gizem Nacir / Spring 2016

The original name of the Transat chair is Fauteuil Transat. Eileen Gray used different versions of this chair on the terraces at both E.1027 and Tempe a Pailla. Materials used in this version of the armchair include solid pieces of wood for the frame, which are connected by mortise and tenon joints; inverted U-shaped brass connectors; and thin brass ends for the legs. The final model has a wood frame, wood connections, and leather upholstery.

5. Northeast Façade Shutters Denali Farrell / Spring 2015

The northeastern façade shutters at Tempe a Pailla are the first set of shutters one would see when approaching the house. Eileen Gray made a great effort to be sure that the appearance and the function were synchronized. The total assembly of shutters measures approximately 9 meters (31 feet) long and 1.3 meters (4 feet) tall. Each individual shutter unit holds nine independently operated louvers.

6. Northeast Façade Windows Micah Tichenor / Spring 2015

The northeast-facing window at Tempe a Pailla creates a visual continuity on the exterior as it services two separate interior rooms. The wall between these rooms divides the window asymmetrically. One pair of sliding single-pane window frames faces the living room, and a stationary frame with two pairs of sliding frames faces the bedroom. The movable window frames, combined with the flexibility of the exterior shutter system, allows for various options.

7. Living Room

Laura Filotheidi and Iliana Filotheidi / Spring 2015

The living room at Tempe a Pailla is located on the southeastern side of the house and is divided by two steps leading up to the foyer/dining area. A built-in work table is placed on one end, where it functions as a studio, and a lounge is on the other, where it serves as a spacious sofa. A fireplace with a partially glazed chimney sits on the terrace window wall illustrating Eileen Gray’s idea of lighting, so the flames of the fire would replace the setting sun. The lower walls are covered with a tile dado and indicate the locations for built-in pieces of furniture.

8. Porthole Window Marilyn Corea-Ramirez / Spring 2019

To reflect her interest in a nautical theme, Eileen Gray created three porthole windows on the southeast façade of Tempe a Pailla. The windows are operable and can be pulled back and forth as well as pivoted, owing to the metal pipes and rods. These windows add to the ventilation throughout the space.

Study Model Sequence

Front and Back

Model Sequence and Back

9. Folding Deck Chair Robert Nafie / Spring 2018

Eileen Gray experimented with the design of the folding deck chair in models and drawings. The chair’s frame is constructed of wood with wooden slats spanning the underside of the frames to form the seat of the lounge. The primary materials for the cushion appear to be canvas over foam. The cushion is divided into segments that allow it to be folded and stored when not in use. The entire chair folds in half to save space when stored, as the lower half nests within the upper half of the chair. It is shown on the exterior terrace of Tempe a Pailla.

10. S Bend Chair Sherif Awad / Spring 2018

The S Bend Chair, which can be folded, was designed by Eileen Gray for Tempe a Pailla. It is shown on the exterior terrace of the house. The chair’s main structural frames are made out of slotted wood that is painted cream, with metal bracing on each side. Two versions of the S Bend chair were designed, with different open slots in the frame as well as with options for the suspended cushion in the middle.

S-Bend Chair

S-Bend Chair

S-Bend Chair

S-Bend Chair

Study model chair, folding process

Study model chair, folding process

Study model chair, folding process

Study model chair, folding process

11. Cabinet with Pivoting Drawers Nabi Agzamov / Spring 2015

The hinged wooden clothes cabinet, designed in the 1930s, is painted both inside and out. The six drawers are supported on horizontal and vertical perpendicularly connected planes, which are placed on a metal frame. The structure of the black metal frame fits on the step where it is placed, and a glass surface is on top of the cube. The unit is located in the bedroom of Tempe a Pailla and can be moved along the step, which extends across the width of the room.

Pivoting Cabinet

Pivoting Cabinet

Pivoting Cabinet Pivoting Cabinet

Pivoting Cabinet

Pivoting Cabinet

Pivoting Cabinet

3D Model Sequence

3D Model Sequence

EILEEN GRAY / TEMPE À PAILLA / ALPES MARITIMES, FRANCE

EILEEN GRAY / TEMPE À PAILLA / ALPES MARITIMES, FRANCE

Model

Model Photo Sequences

Flexibility of use was incorporated into several of the components Gray designed for these two houses and was an area of examination in the seminar. Following the pages outlining eleven individual projects, three pieces of furniture are presented in a series of photographs taken in sequence to demonstrate the movement possible in these pieces. The pivoting chest opens three drawers on two sides, allowing access to individual clothing drawers or sets of drawers. The folding lounge chair allows a range of upright positions, and one half can be folded into the other. And the S Bend chair nests one of its arcs into the other, creating a more compact form when not in use. The complexity of operations and the interplay between materials, equipment, and operation became evident in the studies the students fabricated. New photographs were taken to demonstrate more extensively the stages in the nesting or pivoting of the furniture.

Previous Exhibitions

The Eileen Gray seminar informed a pair of exhibitions that I designed and curated in the New York Institute of Technology Center Gallery. Eileen Gray’s 1920s seaside villa E.1027 was the subject of the first exhibition in 2013. Three years later, I installed a second exhibition examining Tempe a Pailla, Gray’s inland house from the 1930s. The exhibitions displayed students’ work alongside my own research.

E.1027—The Experiential Architecture of Eileen Gray, Center Gallery, New York Institute of Technology, in 2013. Following spread: E.1027—The Experiential Architecture of Eileen Gray, Center Gallery, New York Institute of Technology, in 2013.

Credits

Photographs: Nabi Agzamov: 89. Sherif Awad: 84, 85. Marilyn Corea-Ramirez: 76, 77. Jan Greben: 50 top, 65, 67, 90, 91. Jan Greben and Rob Nafie: 47, 81, 93, 94, 95. Natalie Jaggernauth: 51. Jung Yun Kim: 54, 55 Ruting Li: 58, 71–73. Rob Nafie: 79. Annie Schlechter: 50 bottom, 97–111. Bruce M. White: 13, 59, 63. Georges Meguerditchian © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY, fig. 15.

Drawings: Stefan Hecker and Christian F. Müller, Eileen Gray (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1993): 34, 35.

The exhibitions on pages 97–111 include work by: Nabi Agzamov, Tatiana Castano, Cindy Chan, Denali Farrell, Iliana Filotheidi, Laura Filotheidi, Natalie Jaggernauth, Daven Johansen, Ruting Li, Vladimir Minakov, Gizem Nacir, John O’Shea, Chuong Pham, Rostam Seraj, and Micah Tichenor.