Soft walls / hard spaces: an(other) narrative for Eileen Gray’s E.1027

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Content

Soft Walls / Hard Spaces:
An(Other) Narrative for Eileen Gray’s E.1027

by

Fleurette West

______________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

August 2015

Copyright 2015 Fleurette West
ii
Table of Contents
List of Figures iii
Abstract iv
Introduction: Spine is to Skin as Container is to ( ____ )? 1
Things Pressed Inside of Other Things 10
Le Corbusier as ill sea 20
Negative Narratives and Subversive Structures 22
Room Within a Room 27
A Conversation Between Jean Badovici and Eileen Gray 28
Epilogue: White Sheets 30
Bibliography 32

iii
List of Figures
Figure 1. X-ray of my spine, 2002 Fleurette West
Figure 2. Picture of my scar taken at a Palm Springs hotel pool, 2013 Fleurette West
Figure 3. Spineline, Digital collage of a selective timeline for the events pertaining to
E.1027 arranged around a spinal cord, 2015 Fleurette West

Figure 4. Color plate of the living room interior of E.1027 as featured in L’Architecture
vivante, automne & hiver 1929, Editions Albert Morance. Grande salle (en
couleur), Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, E.1027, Cap Martin Roquebrune, 1926-
1929

Figure 5. Interior view of living room in E.1027 featuring Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair
and Transat chair, Historical image, 1929 Photographer unknown

Figure 6. E.1027 abandoned into ruin and occupied by squatters, 1980’s-1990’s
Photographer unknown

Figure 7. E.1027 recently restored after fifteen years of difficult renovations. Villa E-1027 /
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici. © 2015 Manuel Bougot

Figure 8. The Bibendum Chair designed by Eileen Gray in 1926 , 2015 Product photograph

Figure 9. The adjustable E1027 Telescopic Table designed by Eileen Gray in1927, 2015
Product photograph

Figure 10. The Transat Chair designed by Eileen Gray in 1927, 2015 Product photograph

Figure 11. Le Corbusier painting a mural on E.1027 in the nude. Historical image,
1938 Photographer unknown

iv
Abstract
This thesis uncovers Eileen Gray's French modernist villa E.1027 as a site that performs
resistance sensibilities using queer feminist traditions of transmission. Through a reading of
Eileen Gray's undermining of Corbusien principles by means of non-linear bodily interpretations,
I seek to invoke an(other) narrative space for E.1027 that suggests a feminine repositioning of its
phallocentric story.

.
1

“The body presents the paradox of contained and container
at once. Thus our attention is continually focused upon the
boundaries or limits of the body; known from an exterior the
limits of the body as object; known from an interior, the limits of
its physical extension into space.”
1

- Susan Stewart
Introduction: Spine is to Skin as Container is to ( ______ )?

Figure 1. X-ray of my spine, 2002 Fleurette West

Someone once asked me to describe my relationship to my spine. More specifically, to the metal
embedded between my vertebrae. What is my relationship to the industrial materials fused to my
skeleton, entangled with growing sinews and tissue? As I had never attached thought to this, I
had no language. I have felt this and screamed it and fucked it, but I have never conversed with
it. I will try to now.
It is like saying: How do you feel about your relationship to your skin?
No it is not.

1
Susan Sidlauskas quotes Susan Stewart from In Longing. Reed, Christopher. "Psyche and Sympathy: Staging
Interiority in the Early Modern Home by Susan Sidlauskas." In Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in
Modern Art and Architecture, 67. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.

2
Skin is loaded. LOADED. That may have been too much.
A barrier. A porous membrane. A tenuous protector. A social signifier.
Last summer at a Palm Springs hotel pool, I sat in the 99-degree shade at the end of a long picnic
table. The surface of the table was sticky with mojito spillage, sunscreen residue and sweat from
the dozen or so bodies adhered to it.
A comment drifts over from the center of the table:
“You are so much darker.”
“Than what?”
He clarifies, “Everyone else here.”
Hmmmm. Suddenly we are in a room and I am no longer at the end of a picnic table but on a
stage in the middle. Only it is not a room because it breathes like cellular respiration.
The skin holds in the shape of the body.
No it does not.
The skeleton determines the shape of the body.
No it does not.
This is quickly becoming a drab duality between outside and inside and who really cares?
Something is always inside and someone is usually outside of it. Can you be inside and outside at
the same time? Is that not what being a body is? What a person is? Color is? What being is?
Being a we? Is a woman? Can we be?

Figure 2. Picture of my scar taken at a Palm Springs hotel pool, 2013 Fleurette West

3
What if we existed in the word is as if it were a place? If is is the third person singular present
indicative of be, then is=be.
We be, so we is.
I am trying to have a conversation about internal structure, exterior casing and some liminal,
unintelligible, potentialities housed within is. Okay housed within being. A collective being. A
house for a collective being.
But back to my back: the relationship is material, unbidden, social and psychic. I predict the
weather. I set off security alarms at the Office Depot in North Hollywood. This irregular spine is
stronger than yours.
My body is a twisted structure, securely binding this residence with skin.
Can the house be considered a container for the body in the same way that the body houses
consciousness? Bodies in a house. Rooms to house bodies.
There is a problematic tendency to speak in terms of interiority and exteriority. The French
philosopher Gaston Bachelard describes the polemic of “outside and inside” as metaphor by
relating it to “the sharpness of the dialectics of yes and no, which decides everything.”
2
The
premises of logic determine a system will geometrically position things to either be or not be.
Hmmmmmm. Being determined through a spatiality measure. What about conditions that
transcend the geometric constraints of logic? Surely ontological inquiry can occupy multiple
planes and does so in the experiences of the alienated, which are both inside and outside.
3

2
Bachelard, Gaston, "The Dialectics of Outside and Inside." in The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (1958,
Boston: Beacon Press, ed. 1994), 211.
3
Ibid., 212.
4
The term differential oppositional consciousness describes the process of fluidly navigating
multiple perspectives because of one’s marginalized position.
4
It is a skill set of resistance that
enables individuals to subvert an oppressive system from within because their consciousness is
nomadic, fugitive and shape-shifting.

Irish architect Eileen Gray designed E.1027 to be a house of shifting shapes that adjusts itself
depending on the desires of the occupants. Doors close only to open new rooms allowing a door
to be open, closed, a gate and a hallway all at the same time. Tables adjust, disconnect and easily
relocate to function as desks or headboards that float from one function to the next like ghosts.
Carpets move, walls slide and stairs house closets, blending static spaces with motion and
activity. It is a shifting set activated by players who set into motion a performance that defies
heteronormative sensibilities of modernist space.
5

It is a playroom fun house pretending to be a modernist business suit.
Only it’s not really pretending.
It is wearing a wig made of its own hair.

4
This term was coined by Chela Sandavol to describe the experience of displaced cultures inhabiting new spaces.
Kaplan, Caren, “Deterritorializations: The rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse.” in Cultural
Critique, No6, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, (Spring, 1987), pp. 187.
5
Bonnevier, Katarina, "Lecture One: Living Room E.1027." In Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer
Feminist Theory of Architecture, (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007), 49.

5

Figure 3. Spineline, Digital collage of a selective timeline for the events pertaining to
E.1027 arranged around a spinal cord, 2015 Fleurette West

6

Figure 4. Color plate of the living room interior of E.1027 as featured in L’Architecture
vivante, automne & hiver 1929, © Editions Albert Morance. Grande salle (en
couleur), Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, E.1027, Cap Martin Roquebrune, 1926-
1929.

7

Figure 5. Interior view of living room in E.1027 featuring Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair
and Transat chair, Historical image, 1929 Photographer unknown.

8

Figure 6. E.1027 abandoned into ruin and occupied by squatters, 1980’s-1990’s
Photographer unknown.

9

Figure 7. E.1027 recently restored after fifteen years of difficult renovations. Villa E-1027 /
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici. © 2015 Manuel Bougot.

10
Things pressed Inside of O T H E R Things:
“Desolidifying space and d i s s o l v i n g spatial distinctions”.
6

The Deleuzian concept of the Leibnizian fold suggests that a fold functions not just as a material
spatial complication but also as a site for birthed metaphysical multiplicities.
7
As the fold
materially separates and comes together, its fluidity creates autonomy between what is inside and
what is outside of the fold. They are different spaces yet part of the same material and therefore
indistinguishable, what Anthony Vidler refers to as “link/nonlink between inner and outer, upper
and lower.”
8
In this sense, voids are impossible because “the matter out of which a fold is
constituted is after all the same matter as forms the space in the pleat, under the pleat, and
between the pleats.”
9
Therefore, the perceived void is in actuality an active space simply not
visible from the surface.

In contemplating the kind of activity that can be present within the unseen, E.1027 performs a
meaningful dance of concealment, beginning with Gray’s naming of the house. The name takes
the form of a personalized cryptogram with each number representing a letter of the alphabet that
corresponds with Gray’s initials along with her then partner and lover, Jean Badovici:
10

6
Beckmann, John, "Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being." In The Virtual Dimension:
Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 150.
7
Vidler, Anthony, “Skins ans Bones: Folded Forms from Leibniz to Lynn.” In Warped space, (Cambridge
Massachusetts: The MIT Press), 219.
8
Ibid., 230
9
Ibid., 225
10
Jean Badovici was a respected architect, critic and publisher of the French avant-garde journal, L’Architecture
Vivante who was immediately drawn to Gray’s work because her ideas were intuitively in dialogue with the works
that he was publishing on. Through Badovici she became acquainted with Le Corbusier, Mies Van de Rohe as well
as the work coming out of the Bauhaus. Despite being untrained in an exclusively male field, Badovici encouraged
her to apply her furniture skills to an architectural site leading to the construction of E1027.
Walker, Dorothy, "L'Art De Vivre: The Designs of Eileen Gray (1878-1976)."Irish Arts Review Yearbook 15
(1999): 118-25. Accessed April 9, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493052.

11
E.1027
E (Eileen) 10 (Jean) 2 (Badovici) 7 (Gray).
11

J and B inserted between E and G.
She envelops him.
He is inside her.
Patricia O’Reilly interprets the visual layout of the house as two intertwined bodies, allowing
rooms to exhale and levels to move in and out of each other.
12
Constructed by Gray to be a
dwelling for her and Badovici to live in together, a bodily consideration is suggested that
becomes specific to her, binding her very body to the narrative of the house. This corporeal
reading is reinforced by Gray’s own description, detailing the experience of what entering a
house should feel like:
The desire to penetrate.…a transition which still keeps the mystery of the object one is
going to see, which keeps the pleasure in suspense.…Entering a house is like the
sensation of entering a mouth which will close behind you….or like the sensation of
pleasure when one arrives with a boat in a harbour, the feeling of being enclosed but free
to circulate.…The individual should have the feeling of penetrating without effort a place
where he feels protected.
13

The spatial encounter that Gray describes embodies the kind of pleasure derived from both
entering and receiving. Through embracing full enclosure, the individual is able to move freely,
safely unhindered; a type of unrestraint achieved through restriction and anticipation.
Brian Dillon similarly describes the villa as “a feat of compression,” circuitously containing
nooks within nooks that hold space for possible activity.
14
The rooms are designed to be

11
Agrest, Diana, "Battle Lines: E.1027 by Beatriz Colomina." In The Sex of Architecture, (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1996), 167.
12
O' Reilly, Patricia, "FURNITURE AS ART: the work of Eileen Gray." History Ireland 18, no. 3, (May/June 2010),
45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40664797
13
Adam, Peter, Eileen Gray: Architect/designer (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1987), 217.
14
From a review of Eileen Gray’s at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, 2013.
Dillon, Brian, "LRB · Brian Dillon “On Not Getting the Credit,” in London Review of Books vol 35, no10 (May 23,
2013), 5. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/brian-dillon/on-not-getting-the-credit.
12
multipurpose and easily transformable with hidden alcoves containing beds, or pillows and
blankets stored within unexpected furniture pieces.
15

Two levels pierced by a spiral, spinal staircase traveling up the center to a glass room with a
ceiling to the sky.
The sunlight is direct,
scorching and absorbing to a hand touching metal.
Soft, white sailcloth allow your skin to brush over to an unscathed point of contact
between your fingertips and the fibers of the canvas.

A variety of sensual textures appear throughout the villa such as fur throws, canvas and cork
surfaces to dampen the sound of clanging glassware and soften harsh surfaces. It was designed
with consideration for the climate, wind direction, sunlight and seasonal changes through
adjustable windows that slide, pivot or fold depending on the amount of desired exposure.
16

Using lightweight adjustable furniture with maneuverable mechanisms, each discrete space
allowed for an occupant to have personalized access to their needs assuring privacy and comfort
without shame or embarrassment.
I’m trying to imagine this home carefully constructed to guard your indiscretions.
I’m looking at a birds-eye view of a blueprint for the house.
The upper level is the floor where the entrance is.
To my untrained eye it looks like the front door opens to a short wall with a closet.

“Put your coat away and help yourself to a drink.”
“Wait, is that someone at the door? Grab a jacket and cover up. Better yet, hide in the closet. ”

15
Weisman, Leslie Kanes, “The Spatial Caste System,” in Discrimination by Design (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1992), 30.
16
Ibid., 31
13
The beds in the villa are thought to be one of the first examples to be covered in colored sheets,
implying that the unmade bed held not just physical comfort but beauty as well.
17
It was an
interior-focused domesticity that emphasized the experienced while challenging the “over-
intellectualization of [modernist] architecture,” which oppressively dictated how one was to
engage with a space.
18

My eye is ignorant to the methods of decoding an architectural blueprint. I could go through
the trouble of finding out however, I already know from the descriptions that exist that my
interpretation is a bit off. For example: When the front door is opened, the visitor is privileged
to an uninterrupted view of the entire living room, not a closet. But I like my version better and
even if it is wrong it is still kind of true. You will never be exposed in this house unless you
want to be and even then the house will not be the one to expose you.

Gray’s approach was to reimagine a theoretical and architectural structure that valued the “lived
and felt rather than conceptualized.”
19

This intellectual coldness which we have arrived at and which interprets only too well the
hard laws of modern machinery can only be a temporary phenomenon….I want to
develop these formulas and push them to the point at which they are in contact with
life….The avant-garde is intoxicated by the machine aesthetic….But the machine
aesthetic is not everything….Their intense intellectualism wants to suppress that which is
marvelous in life.
20

17
Ibid., 30
18
Rykwert, Joseph, "Eileen Gray: Two Houses and an Interior." Perspecta13/14 (1971), 69.
19
Constant, Caroline, "E.1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray." Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, vol. 53, no. 3 (1994), 267.
20
Weisman, Leslie Kanes, “The Spatial Caste System,” in Discrimination by Design (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1992), 30.
14
Gray’s critique subverted the machine aesthetic while still adhering to the aesthetic rigidity of Le
Corbusier’s rules for the Five Points of the New Architecture.
21
Therefore, her resistance
emerged not through the appearance of E.1027 but through the bodily experience of navigating
and inhabiting it. What Gray essentially rejected was Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale,
which functioned as a way to control movement through a space using formal reveals and spatial
interventions. Le Corbusier determined that the movement within a space should be calculated
with an intended direction and outcome built into the architecture.
22

WALK TO THE END OF THE CARPET
NOTICE THE SCULPTURE
TURN TO THE WINDOW
FOLLOW THE SHADES TO THE CHAIR
SIT DOWN

The promenade architecturale’s open floor plan with wide spans of space and minimal visual
interruption resulted in clean planes and sharp angles that articulated precisely the way one
should interact with the space in the purest way possible. In its esoteric reverence to form, the
opportunity for pleasure, deviance, privacy or the unexpected becomes compromised. There is
no interiority because the interior behaves like an exterior, public space.

21
The five points of the New Architecture are as follows: 1.The structure must stand on gridded, equally spaced
columns that lift the foundation above ground. 2. The roof must be accessible by staircase. 3. There must be a
combination of both fixed and freestanding walls. 4.The windows must be horizontal. 5.The window facing South
must open up to a facade that extends beyond the perceived supports.
Walker, Dorothy, "L'Art De Vivre: The Designs of Eileen Gray (1878-1976)."Irish Arts Review Yearbook 15 (1999),
122. Accessed April 9, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493052.
22
Dillon, Brian.,"LRB · Brian Dillon “On Not Getting the Credit,” in London Review of Books vol 35, no10 (May
23, 2013), 5. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/brian-dillon/on-not-getting-the-credit.
15
Gray’s hybrid modality of articulating movement without determining it became a point of
fascination and eventual obsession for Le Corbusier. He was a frequent guest of the house,
spending much of his time visiting his close friend, Jean Badovici. When Gray moved out of the
house following their breakup, Le Corbusier continued his prolonged stays and eventual
occupation of the site.

In 1938, he vandalized E.1027 by painting eight large murals on the walls of the villa without
Gray’s consent. In Beatriz Colomina’s essay, Battle Lines: E.1027, she quotes Le Corbusier
writing to Vladimir Nekrassov in 1932 about his views on the dematerialization of a wall by a
mural: “I admit the mural not to enhance a wall, but on the contrary, as a means to violently
destroy the wall, to remove from it all sense of stability, of weight, etc.”
23
Colomina argues a
point that Peter Adams also makes in Gray’s biography, that if we are to read the house as a body
reflecting Eileen Gray, then Le Corbusier’s decision to violate the integrity of the walls must be
considered an act of rape.
24

In addition to the murals, in 1952 Le Corbusier constructed a small cabin on the perimeter of
E.1027, looking into the property. Colomina states vis-à-vis Adams, that Gray chose the site
because it was not overlooked by any other structures and was ultimately an attempt to control
the gaze upon her.
25
A few years later, Le Corbusier built a cluster of studios with murals of
figures waving in the direction of E.1027. After Badovici died and the villa went to auction, Le
Corbusier convinced his good friend Marie-Louise Schelbert to buy Gray’s house, ensuring his

23
Agrest, Diana, "Battle Lines: E.1027 by Beatriz Colomina." In The Sex of Architecture, (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1996), 174.
24
Ibid., 173
25
Ibid., 173
16
continued access. Then in 1982 he drowned in the sea in front of the villa, forever sealing his
legacy by being honored with a pathway named after him: Promenade Le Corbusier. The erasure
of Eileen Gray from E.1027 continued as the house fell into ruin and squatters took it over. It
was not until the French government discovered the murals by the world-renowned modernist
giant that the house became recognized as a historical site in 1999 and restorations began.
26

Depending on whether you are an Eileen Gray scholar or a Le Corbusier scholar, there lies a
white sheath that can be pulled down to cover the murals or lifted up to unveil them.

26
Rault, Jasmine, “Accommodating Ambiguity:Eileen Gray and Radclyffe Hall” in Eileen Gray: New Angles on
Gender and Sexuality (2006), 108.
17

Figure 8. The Bibendum Chair designed by Eileen Gray in1926
Product photograph, 2015

Plump round rolls of white leather stacked and sewn into a semicircle is elegantly placed on a
base of chrome.
Make a “U” in the air with your hand, and flex your wrist like you are about to take a glass of
water.
Your body is cupped as you nestle back into voluptuous layers of Michelin Man fat.
Swollen, bulging and robust, yet light and easy to move.
27

27
The Bibendum Chair was inspired by the Michelin Man tire mascot. It was lightweight and comfortable.
Goff, Jennifer, "Shades of Gray." Irish Arts Review 30, no. 3 (2013), 106. Accessed April 14, 2015. Jstor.
18

Figure 9. The adjustable E1027 Telescopic Table designed by Eileen Gray in1927
Product photograph 2015

Turn to the left a bit. Higher. Wait, that’s too much.
A little lower. Lean back more. Like this.
Use a pillow. Bring it closer. Closer. So it’s touching my thigh. Yeah, right there.
That’s perfect. Ok I’m finished.
Tubular steel rings reflect one another. The bottom ring almost closed like a forefinger and a
thumb about to touch. The top ring is holding up a sliver of glass and a slice of honey toast.
28

28
Gray designed the telescopic table to adjust in height so as to enjoy meals in bed.
Goff, Jennifer, "Shades of Gray." Irish Arts Review 30, no. 3 (2013), 106. Accessed April 14, 2015. Jstor.
19
Figure 10. The Transat Chair designed by Eileen Gray in 1927,
Product photograph 2015

Sit down and lean back. Is that too low?
Do you want it to be longer?
Do you want to be longer?
Do you want to pretend that you are longer?
29

29
Wood and metal, can be adjusted for length, size and headrest extension. Made for many types of bodies.
Goff, Jennifer, "Shades of Gray." Irish Arts Review 30, no. 3 (2013), 106. Accessed April 14, 2015. Jstor.
20
Le Corbusier as ill sea
The following image is of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, also known as Le Corbusier,
sometimes known as Corbu, maybe known as LC, here known as ill sea.

Figure 11. Le Corbusier painting a mural on E.1027 in the nude. Historical image,
1938 Photographer unknown
21
ill sea’s fleshy, naked body turns to the camera ever so slightly. His hand is suspended in mid
action as he mixes a cup of paint preventing a gelatinous skin from forming on the surface. His
torso is in shadow with filtered light dancing on his forearm while his lower half is bathed in
bright light. It looks like a gradient tan is creeping down his body but through squinted eyes,
suddenly his body splits at the hip. The black frames of his spectacles mirror the graphic ellipses
in the mural in the same way that the weight of his painted stroke matches the thickness of the
scars on his leg. Each jagged wound peppered by incision holes reproduce the ovate forms in the
composition. The frond texture just beside ill sea’s nipple could be a monoprint from his oiled,
slicked back hair. He is at ease, confident and unconcerned with the damage he is inflicting on
the walls of Eileen Gray’s house, E.1027. ill sea is embedded in the mural, his body pushed into
his own material gestures. He becomes the marks and the marks become a signifier that melds
into being and storytelling.

ill sea is planted into this story as a result of the historical occupation initiated first by his own
fixation, then perpetuated through his celebrity status of notoriety within the canon of
modernism. Scholars cannot write about E.1027 without also mentioning ill sea and the eight
murals he unrelentingly ”gifted” to the house against her will.
30
Is there an(other) way to tell this
story that attempts to remove his marks?

30
Jasmine Rault facetiously refers to LeCorbusiers paintings as his “gift” to Gray.
Rault, Jasmine, "Occupying E.1027: Reconsidering Le Corbusier's "Gift" to Eileen Gray." Space and Culture 8, no.
160 (2005), 162.

22
Negative Narratives and Subversive Structures
Scholars began to investigate Le Corbusier’s obsession with Villa E-1027, and the
control of authorship of the work. The preoccupation with Le Corbusier and the
conservation of the house have come to dominate discussion of the building as this
connects with the restoration of the reputation of Eileen Gray.
31

The story of the murals is complicated. The initial act is disturbing, the restoration of it is
upsetting, but more so the telling of it seems to perpetuate the legacy of wrongdoing. If we are
to consider the violation an act of rape, is there a way to tell the story that channels the lived and
felt that Gray embedded into the spirit of the design? The problem with Le Corbusier occupying
Eileen Gray’s legacy begins with the dominant narrating voice within history. To reimagine
history requires a different way of conceiving what it means to know. By thinking in terms of
spatial positioning, maybe there is a way to apply a similar reframing to language:
Barbara Cooper contends that thinking about how women move through space, rather
than focusing on the character of the spaces themselves, may help feminist theorists find
a new and revitalizing point of entry into the question of female agency. She documents
how women contribute to the gradual transformation of gender relations not simply
through conscious manipulation, resistance, or protest but also through the active spatial
(re)positioning.
32

What would the reframing of E.1027’s history look like through a feminine spatial repositioning?

When Eileen Gray first met Jean Badovici in Paris in 1921, she was a part of a queer social circle
on Paris’s Left Bank; a group of active feminists, avant-garde writers, musicians and artists.
33

She was a prominent member of the infamous weekly salons led by Natalie Clifford Barney who

31
Ryan, Daniel, “From Eclecticism to Doubt: Re-imagining Eileen Gray” at Imagining: The 27
th
Annual Conference
of the Society of Architectural Historians, (Australia and New Zealand, University of Newcastle, 30
th
June- 2
nd
July
2010), 3.
32
Ahrentzen, Sherry, "The Space Between The Studs: Feminism And Architecture." Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society 29, no. 1 (2003), 193. Accessed April 1, 2015. Jstor.
33
Bonnevier, Katarina, "Lecture One: Living Room E.1027." In Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer
Feminist Theory of Architecture, (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007), 45.
23
hosted a literary space for those attempting to dampen the voice of a heteronormative literary
canon.
34
The group of radical thinkers committed themselves to supportive discourse intended to
upend oppressive social hierarchies while embracing scandal and deviancy.
35

In Women’s Places, Lynne Walker explains how Gray’s queerness is often mentioned but not
necessarily analyzed because her sexuality was not one that she identified with politically.
36
She
may have not felt the need to position her sexuality because she allowed herself to move fluidly
between different partnerships, deeming it impossible to be attached to a system of
categorization. Walker’s point is essential when considering E.1027 because it indicates the
multiplicities embedded within Eileen Gray’s ideology. While her approach to life may have
been characterized by radical and forward thinking, her outward expression of that politic was
much more subtle and lived. E.1027 bears witness to this in veiling an experimentally innovative
domestic space within the aesthetic language of design. Therefore, to structure the analysis of the
house through the predominantly masculine read of modernism limits the accessibility that the
site actually provides; it must be read through a queer feminist lens.

34
Through the encouragement of her community Gray opened her own gallery where she became widely regarded
for her experimental lacquer work and furniture designs that were linked to the ideology coming out of the Dutch de
Stijl and Russian Constructivist movements.
Walker, Dorothy, "L'Art De Vivre: The Designs of Eileen Gray (1878-1976)."Irish Arts Review Yearbook 15 (1999),
121. Accessed April 9, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493052.
35
Adam, Peter, “The Early Twenties and the Lota Apartment” in Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work (Schirmer/Mosel:
Munich, 2008), 58-59.
36
Bonnevier, Katarina, "Lecture One: Living Room E.1027." In Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer
Feminist Theory of Architecture, (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007), 49.
24
Rooms.
Act so that there is no use in a centre.
A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing.
They do not eat who mention.
silver and sweet. There was an occupation.
A whole centre and a border make hanging a way of dressing. This which is not why there is
a voice is the remains of an offering. There was no rental.

A Table.
A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change.
A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall.
A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean
that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake.

-Excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
37

Eileen Gray’s E.1027 remarkably demonstrates a feminine spatial repositioning and yet its
historical narrative reflects the opposite. It is in fact occupied and silenced by the dominant
presence of either Le Corbusier’s overwhelming celebrity or the narrative of his violence against
her. In Modernity and the Spaces of Feminity, Griselda Pollock asserted how in order to overturn
the gendered traditions that are celebrated in modernism, there must be a “deconstruction of the
masculinist myths of modernism.”
38
The problem with the current critical, feminist texts
regarding E1027 is that the straightforward structure does not represent the multiplicities hidden
within the fabric of Eileen Gray’s work and therefore perpetuates the rape through the retelling.

37
Stein, Gertrude, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (Aukland: Floating Press, 2009). Accessed December 1,
2014. http://www.bartleby.com/140/.
38
Pollock, Griselda, “Modernity and the spaces of feminity” in Visions & Difference: Femininity, Feminism and
the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 50.
25
There is a long tradition of feminist writing that uses the structure of historical narrative as a
vehicle to inject a new story. In 1405, Jean de Muen wrote a French Medieval poem titled
Roman de la Rose. It was an allegorical text that took the narrative structure of a vision or a
dream. The sensual poem circulated amongst the Catholic Church, which was unusual
considering it contained immoral language and subject matter. Despite the secular nature of the
work, the Pope not only advocated for its dispersal but also banned any man from allowing a
woman to read it. The poem detailed the monstrosities of the feminine gender, attacking their
bodies, mannerisms and intellect as being detrimental to the morality of the church. The French
Italian writer, Christine de Pizan, obtained a copy and found a way to force her voice into the
conversation. As a respected author and court writer, educated in mythology, aristocratic culture
and poetry, she frequently lectured and wrote on subjects pertaining to popular culture through
clever forms of rhetoric and experimental writing techniques. Her reaction to Jean de Muen’s
text was one of disbelief and humor. She felt that a text that absurd yet digested by so many
celebrated high thinkers must be a joke. And if it were not a joke, then she would turn it into one
by dismantling its power through mockery masked in allegory. She began writing The Book of
the City of Ladies as a direct response to the farce, using the format of a fictional story.

The story centers on an allegorical city comprised of famous historical women who were defined
feminine not by noble birth, but by noble spirit. Each woman functioned as either a wall or a
building in the foundation of the growing city, while inconspicuously activating a different nail
in de Pizan’s argument against Jean de Muen. This position is subversively hidden within the
poetic manifestation of a fictional story comprised of historical figures. The book became more
or less an instruction manual for other women to follow.
26
In Deterritorialization: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,
Caren Kaplan compares the difference between self in modern and postmodern autobiographical
writing. She argues for a narrative space that can and should be filled with the non-linear
storytelling and poetic renditions of a de-centered voice: “…a new terrain, a new location, in
feminist poetics. Not a room of one’s own, not a fully public or collective self, not a domestic
realm-it is a space in the imagination which allows for the inside, the outside and the liminal
elements of in between.”
39

In keeping within this postmodern tradition, is there a way to introduce an(other) narrative for
Eileen Gray’s E1027 that emancipates her story from a phallocentric narrative that is perpetually
marginalizing her? What would a story look like with reorganized parts and considerations of the
sensual? What would her narrative be if told through a corporeal interpretation? Would any of
these fictitious, poetic renditions be less true?

39
Kaplan, Caren, “Deterritorializations: The rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse.” in
Cultural Critique, No6, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, (Spring, 1987), pp. 197.
27
Room Within a Room
The following is a word meditation on “room” in pursuit of Georges Perec’s “space” with an
E. E. Cummings lovechild.
40

OPEN ROOM
TOO MUCH ROOM
ROOM FOR DOUBT
LACK OF ROOM
NO ROOM
IS THERE ROOM
ROOM FOR ONE
MORE
LITTLE ROOM
AMPLE ROOM
ROOM MATE
BRIDE(G)ROOM
ROOM FULL

EMPTY ROOM

CLASS ROOM DARK ROOM HOME ROOM
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
CROWDED ROOM
LEAVE SOME ROOM
SPARE ROOM
MORE ROOM
LEG ROOM
ROOM NUMBER
ROOM CHECK
ROOM TEMPERATURE
OWN ROOM
BACK ROOM
LOCKER ROOM TALK
ROOM AND BOARD
POWDER ROOM
ELBOW ROOM
LADIES ROOM
REST ROOM
LITTLE BOYS ROOM
ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
ROOM WITH
ROOM TOGETHER

40
Perac, Georges, “Species of Spaces/ Es Espèces d'espaces” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans.
by John Sturrock (1974, Acklam: Information As Material, 2012).

28
A Conversation Between Jean Badovici and Eileen Gray
Below are excerpts from a conversation between Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici that appeared in
L’Architecture Vivant: E.1027: Maison en Bard de Mer in 1929. This transcript is taken directly
from Eileen Gray’s 2008 biography by Peter Adams.
41
It is one of the few translated pieces of
Gray’s remaining published words as she burned much of her paperwork and correspondence
toward the end of her life.
42

JB: You intend to rediscover emotion.

EG: Yes, a purified emotion and one that can be expressed in countless ways…an
emotion purified by knowledge, enriched by ideas. This does not exclude the
knowledge and appreciation of scientific achievements. All one has to ask of
artists is to be of their time…All it takes sometimes is to choose a material
beautiful in itself and worked with sincere simplicity…A beautiful work speaks
more truth than the artist.

JB: But how does one express a period, and especially a period like ours, so full of
contradictions?

EG: Every work of art is symbolic. It conveys, it suggests the essential rather than
representing it. It is up to artists to find, in the multitude of contradictory
elements, the one that gives intellectual and emotional support to both the
individual and the social man.

JB: Do you think that inspiration will ever be up to such a task?

EG: It is life itself, the meaning of life, that is the inspiration…

41
Adam, Peter, “E.1027” in Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work (Schirmer/Mosel: Munich, 2008), 108-110.
42
Dillon, Brian.,"LRB · Brian Dillon “On Not Getting the Credit,” in London Review of Books vol 35, no10 (May
23, 2013), 3. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/brian-dillon/on-not-getting-the-credit.
29
JB: You demand the architect a universal mind?

EG: Almost! What is essential is that [s]he understands the meaning of each thing,
and that [s]he knows how to be simple and sound. By not neglecting any means
of expression, [s]he will be able in turn to make use of the most diverse material.
By the judicious use of materials and architectural structure [s]he will be able to
express what [s]he whishes of the life surrounding [her]him.

JB: There’s a word you haven’t spoken but that all of your statements lead me to
expect: it is unity. For it is quiet obvious that this diversity of the sources of
inspiration and diversity of the elements of execution would only lead to
chaotic disorder if the architect did not coordinate them all and direct them
towards a common goal.

EG: Actually there is no architectural creation in the true sense of the word that is not
an organic unity. But while formerly the unity was completely exterior, it is now
necessary to make it interior also, right down to the slightest details. Exterior
architecture seems to have interested avant-garde architects at the expense of the
interior. As though the house ought to be conceived more for the pleasure of the
eyes than for the comfort of its inhabitants…The thing constructed has more
importance than the way it is constructed, and the process is subordinate to the
plan, not the plan to the process. It is not simply a matter of constructing beautiful
ensembles of lines, but above all dwellings for people.

..art is founded on habit, but not on the fleeting or rather artificial habit that
creates fashion. What is necessary is to give the object the form best suited to the
spontaneous gesture or instinctive reflex which corresponds to its use…

Think of those exaggerations such as introducing camping furniture, deck chairs
and folding chairs in a room meant for rest or working at home. No more
intimacy, no more atmosphere! They simplified everything to death. Simplicity
does not always mean simplification…formulas are nothing, life is everything.
And life is simultaneously mind and heart.
30
Epilogue: White Sheets
Despite the misdirected efforts to restore Gray’s villa, there still exist several problematic
components tied into its restoration. There are rumors that the renovations have been botched
and that the restoration has essentially altered the integrity of Eileen Gray’s design. Where Gray
took great care in considering weight and balance, there are now improperly measured additions
that interfere with the way one moves throughout the space.
43
As Gray’s recognition continues to
grow, the furniture that she designed for E.1027 is ironically becoming increasingly
unaffordable. As a result, her iconic pieces are sold through a gallery and the money is used to
buy slightly inaccurate replicas, which will then re-occupy the home.
44
Additionally, the French
government insists that only pieces that have been destroyed may be replicated. This becomes
complicated when many of Gray’s surviving pieces are being vitally rotated throughout different
exhibitions, acquiring the much-needed recognition she was initially denied. Consequently, the
interior contains several gaps where the pieces that that are being exhibited would normally rest.

The symbolic qualities of the apparatus to cover the murals are heavy handed: a white sheet to
cover a rape and a lifted sheet to celebrate it. The violence becomes neatly veiled. The silence of
an absence may indicate the loss of a mass and the removal of a sound. A fleshy translation
might suggest the loss of a body and the removal of a voice. As Gray was disinterested in the
authority distributed through the rules of avant-garde design, she ultimately took an anti-
theoretical position throughout her life, which many believe was to her own detriment and

43
Gordon, Alastair, “Le Corbusier’s Role in the Controvery Over Eileen Gray’s E.1027,” in The Wall Street Journal
(August 19, 2013). http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324354704578637901327433828
44
Rawsthorn, Alice, “The Tortured History of Eileen Gray’s Modern Gem,” The New York Times (August 25,
2013). http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/arts/design/The-Tortured-History-of-Eileen-Grays-Modern-Gem.html
31
delayed her inclusion in the canon of modernist architecture.
45
Her refusal to frame her practice
theoretically was not indicative of a lack in conceptual structure, but rather functioned as a form
of critique and resistance: dismissal rather than mindless omission. She was responding to the
reductive nature of her male contemporaries who were intent on editing out the body in lieu of a
purer form.
46
Her reentry into this history is vital and needed but it must be through a feminine
positioning that reflects the same spirit of resistance that her work did.

45
Constant, Caroline, "E.1027: The Nonheroic Modernism of Eileen Gray." Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, vol. 53, no. 3 (1994), 265.
46
Reed, Christopher. "Psyche and Sympathy: Staging Interiority in the Early Modern Home by Susan Sidlauskas."
In Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, (London: Thames and Hudson,
1996), 80.
32
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Asset Metadata

Creator West, Fleurette (author)

Core Title Soft walls / hard spaces: an(other) narrative for Eileen Gray’s E.1027

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 08/11/2015

Defense Date 08/11/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Architecture,domesticity,E.1027,Eileen Gray,feminine spaces,feminism,gendered spaces,Home,interiority,Le Corbusier,modernism,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,postmodernism,queer narratives

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Advisor Fine, Jud (committee chair), Hudson, Suzanne P. (committee member), Madani, Tala (committee member)

Creator Email fleurettewest@gmail.com,fwest@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-632796

Unique identifier UC11305724

Identifier etd-WestFleure-3825.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-632796 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WestFleure-3825-1.pdf

Dmrecord 632796

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights West, Fleurette

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis uncovers Eileen Gray's French modernist villa E.1027 as a site that performs resistance sensibilities using queer feminist traditions of transmission. Through a reading of Eileen Gray's undermining of Corbusien principles by means of non-linear bodily interpretations, I seek to invoke an(other) narrative space for E.1027 that suggests a feminine repositioning of its phallocentric story.