See a previous post for more information on this famous modernist house by Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray. There has been a lot of concern about the house’s survival, but as these recent photos by my Danish internet friend Vibeke Jakobsen show, it’s safely undergoing restoration. The house looks so much better – compare these to the photos in the previous post. The house is a major historical site and an important piece of architecture, but despite its fame in architectural circles, it’s a lot less publicly known than it should be. Is that because the architect was a woman? According to Patricia O’Reilly, who has written about the house, it’s undergoing “a €800,000 re-vamp with architect Gattier remaining close to Eileen Gray’s original concept, such as the black and white tiles; inbuilt furniture and footsteps cut out of stone staircase leading to roof terrace. But it has to be said that the focus of attention is on LeCorbusier’s murals and they seem to be the reason for this re-furbishment.” Le Corbusier was fascinated by the house, painted murals on it against Gray’s will, and died swimming just offshore from it – that’s why you see his memorial stone here, and there is a nearby promenade named after him. Thanks, Vibeke, for letting me post these photos here! The architecture nerds will be very happy.

Linda and John Meyers of Wary Meyers Decorative Arts assemble these mod, chic, distinctly 1960s and 70s interiors almost entirely from furniture and objects they find in thrift and vintage sales. They’ve produced some great interior design projects for clients but shown here is their own house in Portland, Maine, which is by now quite well-known. I’m showing it rather than their other excellent projects because here they’re free to be the wildest and the most purely 60s. Their entertaining new blog documents their peripatetic treasure-hunt in what amounts to a decor road movie (photos at bottom are from the blog). There’s something really unerring about their  creative re-use and re-work of the past, their re-introduction of the 60s with its emphasis on pleasure and experience and its occasional psychedelia, and just generally their sense of adventure and adept historical juxtaposition. Much of their material is actually early modernist to midcentury modernist but the ultimate effect is the specific risk-taking quality of the post-50s era. I wish there were more members of this particular design army but it’s gratifying to see that their work is getting plenty of recognition. See the article in the NYT (or click below to read the text). 

Below, from the blog: 

Still life with Dansk salt and pepper shakers.

Above, “Linda walking toward disappointment.” Below, their post says “This worn old Le Corbusier Basculant chair was at a middle school’s sale on Saturday amidst piles of shin guards and Harry Potter books.” Further below, Gerald Thurston lamp. Photo at bottom is just captioned “dreamhouse.”

Lastly, “Waffles grabbed a bee.”

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This list,  inspired by an interesting thread on pushpullbar, is a small selection of great modern buildings that have appeared in 20th C film. Above, Charles Deaton’s Sculpture House, which appeared in Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper. All photos gratefully borrowed from Flickr.

Ricardo Bofill apartment building, seen in Terry Gilliam’s 1975 film Brazil.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, 1924, has appeared in the following films: The House on Haunted Hill, 1958; The Day of the Locust, 1975; Blade Runner, 1982; Black Rain, 1989.

Neutra’s Lovell House, above, appeared in LA Confidential, 1998.

John Lautner’s Elrod House of 1968. The 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever was shot here, shortly after the house was built.

John Lautner’s Chemosphere of 1960. Appeared in Body Double, 1984.

And finally, Corbusier’s Villa Savoie, which appeared in the film French Postcards, 1979.

The French designer and architect  Charlotte Perriand (1903 – 1999) produced some very beautiful furniture and buildings, but she is probably not as well known as she should be, even despite the comprehensive retrospective show of her work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2005. Above is a selection of pieces included in that show. Below is her most well-known piece, a bookcase co-designed with Jean Prouve, as well as many other designs. Perriand worked with Corbusier for 10 years, starting at age 24, on both furniture and architecture. How she came to work with him is a fascinating story:

A friend of hers introduced Perriand to the works of the famous French architect Le Corbusier, including L’art Decoratif d’Aujourd’hui (Today’s Decorative Arts). Inspired by his work, Perriand immediately applied for a design position at Le Corbusier’s atelier. She was dismissed with a condescending comment, “we don’t embroider cushions here.”

Undaunted, Perriand tore apart her garret-style apartment and converted one of the largest rooms into a metal and glass bar. Using her home as a canvas, she applied her ideas and continued to create metal tubular furniture out of chrome and aluminum for her “machine age interior.” By 1927, she designed enough work to be exhibited at the Salon D’Automne. Upon seeing her rooftop bar design and its furnishings, architect Le Corbusier changed his mind and decided to hire Perriand as furniture designer.

Perriand’s earlier pieces were often modular and efficient, almost futurist. Her early influences generally seem modernist while her later experiences in Japan introduced a different aesthetic, and you can see that in the red and black interior below, as well as in her use of paper and bamboo for lighting. She deserves to be better known for her buildings, which include the UN’s League of Nations in Geneva and the Les Arcs building in Switzerland, at bottom. The same goes for her furniture, though this may change now that Cassina is reissuing many of her pieces (she originally designed for Thonet).  Philippe Delahautemaison has created a really good Flickr set of photos of her furniture and decor. More on Charlotte Perriand here and you can also read about her life and design at designboom. The Centre Pompidou’s link in French is here.

Above, cabinet by Perriand in 1939

“Bambou” lounge chair, above, 1940

Above, a chalet by Perriand in Savoie, France.

Above, Japanese inspired interior

Above, ‘refuge tonneau’, futuristic chalet

Building in Les Arcs, Switzerland. This is part of a larger project Perriand worked on collaboratively with Corbusier and others.

And see this amazing swing arm lamp at referencelibrary.

This graph shows the occurrence of the terms “decor” (blue) and “interior design” (red) in The New York Times between 1984 and 2009. What happened to the word “decor”? It fell out of usage in approximately February, 2001, maybe a result of a change in editorial style policy? When we first saw this we wondered if it had to do with some sort of anti-French sentiment, decor being French in origin, but then we realized that its drop in usage came about seven months before 9-11. This was one of many surprising discoveries we made when we asked Jer Thorp to make some graphs for us. Jer, a digital artist and also man about our studio, recently wrote some software for graphing the occurrence of certain words in the newly-opened NYT text database. The NYT only recently made its entire text archive searchable online, beginning with the year 1981. Jer had made some beautiful graphs of various word occurrences, and we asked him to build some for us based on a few design-related keywords. Choosing design-related search terms is hard just because so many design terms have such broad usage, and are common to so many different fields, that a search for them doesn’t tell us much – “design,” for example, or “modern.” So we decided on some slightly more specific search terms: midcentury modern, modernism, Eames, Corbusier, retro, vintage, interior design and decor. We were just curious to see whether there would be a noticeable rise in interest in modern and modernist design, as we thought there might be, and if so, we wanted to see if it was a slow or a steep rise. Of course, the NYT is a very specific publication speaking to a relatively specific audience, and those things have to be taken into consideration when looking at these results. Note: The NYT database isn’t yet fully complete between 1981 and 1984, so we just searched 1984 onward. Tip: each bar is one month. Click on each graph to find a larger version in our Flickr. We may ask Jer to make a few more of these – any suggestions?

Above is the instance of “vintage” (the jade green) vs. “retro” (yellow-green). The near-absence of the word “retro” in the 1980s was surprising. Even more surprising, and it’s a little hard to see here, but over the past year and a half the word “retro” has all but disappeared, while “vintage” maintains its steady rise.

This graph shows the slow, steady increase in interest in “modernism” (red) and “midcentury modern” (orange), with the two almost perfectly mirroring each other. Mentions of the word “Eames” (yellow) and “Corbusier” (pink) were similar. I’m not sure what we were expecting – we thought that perhaps an American designer would be mentioned more often than a European? – but the latter two are about the same. Many more of Jer’s graphs, on a variety of topics, are here.

[Important update: there is new information about what his happened to this house in this update and also in the comments below. Thank you.]

In the late 1920s the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray, who is best known for her furniture design (her Bibendum chair is visible in the third photo above), designed and built a landmark piece of modernist architecture in the form of a seaside house. On a hill overlooking the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, Gray’s E-1027 house was built to share with her lover, critic Jean Badovici. The name of the house sounds impersonal, but it is in fact a numeric code for their joint initials; the interesting story is here and also see a story about the building of the house by Patricia O’Reilly, who has also written a novel based on Gray’s life. The house has steadily fallen into disrepair, and in the 1990s the house’s furniture, also designed by Gray, was sold off by its owner to fund house repairs. But the house continued to distintegrate until efforts to save it were apparently successful in 2000. It was mostly restored (see second photo above) but now I hear that it is again in disrepair. Gray’s inexplicable obscurity has delayed this project far too long. By the late 90s it was a wreck. From greg.org:

What’s… remarkable is that E1027 is still a deteriorating ruin. When I lived in Monaco in 1995-7, I tried once to find it, but no locals could figure out what I was talking about. The most comprehensive images I’ve seen, though, are on flickr, a photoset made by Daniel, an Irish architect, who hopped the fence in 1997 when the house was a squat [the last owner had been murdered a couple of months prior.] I can’t find any images of Gray’s last house, Lou Perou, which was done near St Tropez, either. And I can’t find any word on the status of her own house, Tempe a Pailla, which was inland, up the mountains from Roquebrune & Menton in the village of Castellar. How is it that no modernist pilgrims have tracked and documented this stuff?

The photo above shows Corbusier, his wife and Jean Badovici, photographed by Gray. When you start researching the house,  you start to get the feeling that many believe Corbusier had something to do with Gray’s obscurity. (See the link above for a summary of an interesting paper by Beatriz Colomina). It’s hard to determine what role Corbusier played in this but it’s clear that he was extremely fascinated by E-1027.

Le Corbusier, arguably the greatest architect of the 20th century, was obsessed and haunted by E-1027, the seaside villa Eileen Gray built at Roquebrune Cap Martin in 1929. Over the decades, he sought to possess her “maison en bord de mer” in a multitude of ways. It may have been the last thing he saw before dying of a heart attack while swimming off the rocks beneath E-1027 in 1965. After he died, the footpath serving the area was designated Promenade Le Corbusier. In time, as Gray’s reputation faded, some would even credit him with the design of her villa.

More here. It’s known that Gray was infuriated by Corbusier’s alterations of the villa, especially his murals which she felt defaced it. Even in her nineties it was said she was still fuming about it. (The house’s recent disarray is obvious in the second mural photo.)

Gray disagreed strongly with Corbusier’s idea of a house as a machine, arguing for a more organic conception of the functional house. To this end she built her house taking into consideration the angle of the sun, the wind and the elements of the site so that in every season the house fit into its environment but also and more importantly provided maximum pleasure for its inhabitants. In 2008 the house was listed by Building Design as one of the world’s most romantic buildings.

Photo of restored house from flickr.

For more information about the house and the group working to save it, click below.

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