E.1027

E.1027

As usual I am spending the summer holidays at the Ligurian coast, not far from the French border. This year we had the opportunity to join a guided tour through E.1027 at Roquebrune - Cap Martin, the house designed by Eileen Gray for herself and her partner Jean Badovici in the late 1920's. A good friend of mine had arranged the visit as part of the research for her Phd project. The house is now undergoing refurbishment and will be open to the public soon and I think for the first time ever.

I had been to Cap Martin before, precisely four years ago. Though refurbishment had officially started there was no actual physical evidence of it. Without being able to get into the house, having decided against a break-in, partly due to me being heavily pregnant but I like to think also partly as a sign of respect towards the building, considering its history, it was still possible to catch glimpses of the interior through the broken windows.

There are very few buildings of which I would say that they have charisma, this one definitely being one of them. It seemed so fragile. And in its fragility it had still withstood the developments of the last eighty years, being closed in by large security guarded villas and blocks of luxury apartments. It almost seemed like they were trying to push the tiny house off the cliff. An alien leftover from the times when the site had been “inaccessible and not overlooked from anywhere”. The building resembled an old lady that had lived a full life, bearing her wounds with pride and facing the end of her life in peace and with dignity.

Four years later I return to the house, to the lady - dead but impeccably made up.

Now there are many aspects of E.1027 that one could talk about, such as the quality or lack of quality of the refurbishment, less obvious on the exterior but screaming into your face like exaggerated use of botox in the interior of the building.

One could also mention the irony that lies in the fact that the architect in charge of the refurbishment is the son of family friends of Le Corbusier.

Instead I would rather concentrate on the essay „Battle Lines: E.1027“ written by Beatriz Colomina, because for the first time in my life I think I can put a finger on why it has always irritated me a little.

Beatriz Colomina starts the essay by talking about the antagonistic relationship between public and private in modernist architectural discourse. She talks about the destabilisation of the boundary between the public and the private realms and questions the prejudice of security that is connected to the notion of the domestic. But then in my opinion the text takes an unpredicted turn. Instead of writing about the domestic as a prime war zone, instead of trying to analyse the influence that the misconception (or conscious construction?) of the “safe” private versus the “dangerous” public may have had on architecture and city planning she decided to shift the attention towards a personal feud between Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray. The remainder of the essay is a detailed and disturbing account of the defacement of Eileen Gray’s house by the sexually explicit and hurtful murals that Le Corbusier added to some of the walls in 1938, with the consent of Jean Badovici (who by then was the sole owner of the house) and to the outrage of Eileen Gray.

I am truly grateful to Beatriz Colomina for bringing the architect and designer Eileen Gray to my attention and to the attention of many others. I don’t think she would have been forgotten without her, but she has undoubtedly contributed substantially towards her recognition. I highly value the fact that she - albeit briefly and superficially - touches subjects such as domestic violence, psychological warfare, invisible battles, tactics of intimidation, abuse of power over the media, questions of authorship, which are subjects generally overlooked in favour of more obvious and „male“ ones.

But why do these important issue have to be wrapped in an erotic tale insinuating an unfulfilled sexual obsession of Le Corbusier towards Eileen Gray and her house?

Is it because - and here I would like to quote her - “most architects are perverts”, and because really this is the kind of audience she is writing for?

Is it because she fears that a woman's work will not be interesting for a male audience unless in connection with possibly seedy stories about her private life?

In a letter Le Corbusier invites Eileen Gray to “spread the debate [about whether or not he had the right to paint the murals in the house designed by Eileen Gray] in front of the whole world” but at the same time intimidates her by hinting at the fact that she would stand no chance against him in a public discussion due to his recognition and media position.

Eileen Gray took the conscious decision, not to drag the battle into the public.

So why does Beatriz Colomina?

It seems to me that by insinuating a certain cowardice in Eileen Gray's decision, she wants to prove to herself and to her colleagues that she, in comparison, is superior both in strength and moral. But by doing this Beatriz Colomina fails to realise how patronising her attitude is in reality.

Beatriz Colomina uses Eileen Gray and her work as props in this erotic tale about the iconic Le Corbusier. While this little tale certainly managed to cast some doubt about his personality, what has it done to Eileen Gray? It has forever turned her and her house into objects, to be precise into Le Corbusier’s fetish objects. Under the disguise of female solidarity Beatriz Colomina changes the distribution of power, but instead of inverting it in favour of the abused, she puts herself into the position of power, she steps in as the abuser. She once again turns Eileen Gray into a victim. A victim above all else. The most famous victim in architectural history.

PS: If one has to prefer the discussion of Eileen Gray’s private life before the discussion of her work, I would find it far more interesting to find out why she, after spending five years designing and constructing the house for herself and her partner Jean Badovici, after spending “almost three years living on the site in complete isolation, building the house with the masons, having lunch with them every day”, left the house after only four summers and built a new one for herself alone entirely from scratch.

PPS: Looking at Le Corbusier’s murals – they seem completely out of place in the calm and surprisingly small spaces designed by Eileen.Gray - I cannot help but feel a certain Schadenfreude at the way the clumsy restoration enhances their childish and hysteric nature by exaggerating their awkwardness and garish colours. Turning graffity into a cartoon. Raping the rapist.

Karoline Mayer, Albisola Marina, August 2011

http://www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz/i4/thehtml/keynotes/colomina/colomina.pdf