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.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international blogging event instituted to draw attention to women who excel in the area of technology. Who is Ada Lovelace? From here:

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

See also the Wikipedia entry, where we discovered Lovelace was also, oddly, the only legitimate child of the poet Byron. On Ada Lovelace Day, bloggers are asked to write about a present-day woman in technology. Since this is a design blog and not a tech blog, I’m going to arbitrarily include architecture and design under technology, since they are technical fields. As in other technical fields, woman have excelled in architecture and design but have had a very tough time gaining recognition thanks to the fact that these fields have been extremely male-dominated. When Charlotte Perriand asked Corbusier for a job, he said “We don’t embroider cushions here.” Perriand convinced him to hire her anyway, and went on to become an important figure in design whose star is now rising long after her death. (By the way there is nothing inferior about embroidering cushions, and the textile arts ought to be angry about that remark.) Recent evidence shows that women need female role models much more than men need male role models, and that is why this blog is jumping into the fray. Please also see previous posts on Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Nanna Ditzel, and many other women designers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Charlotte Perriand:

Eileen Gray:

And finally, I love this recent Annie Liebowitz photo of SANAA architect Kazuyo Sejima holding a model of her New Museum design:

On occasion, the women of 20th C design do get a certain amount of recognition. This rare aluminum pendant lamp by Eileen Gray, previously owned by Yves St Laurent, is up for auction at Christie’s and is estimated at US$1 million. Via dailyicon. We’ve written about Gray before, here and 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.

(more…)

Eileen Gray (1878-1976) produced some iconic pieces of early modernist design in a profession and an era hardly designed for women. Raised in Ireland, she trained in London and Paris and worked most of her life in France. She was a close friend of Corbusier’s and it seems clear that the design influences ran both ways, yet her Tubelight and her E-1027 table are still much more well-known than she is. Fortunately her name is slowly becoming better recognized outside design circles. These two pieces, both created in 1927, stand up well nearly a hundred years later and both are still in constant production. The table was designed for her sister, who liked to eat breakfast in bed and couldn’t find an appropriate surface. But it is named for the E-1027, the house Gray designed and built for her lover, the critic Jean Badovici, and that is where it was first shown. Her tubelight is equally compelling. Upcoming posts will include photos of these pieces as they were originally shown.