Eileen Gray, E.1027, 1926-29. Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Alpes- Maritimes, France. from ‘Maison en bord de mer’. L’Architecture Vivante, editor Jean Badovicci. Hiver MCMXXIX, Éditions Albert Morancé.
everyday life I now wish to turn to a case in a different and distinct cultural context, within the heart of the early twentieth century modern architecture movement. The swerving of direction explores the kinds of issues that can be raised and what types of insight can be sparked through a cross- cultural comparison of similar white material. Completed in 1929, E.1027 is the first and most significant architectural work of Eileen Gray, an Anglo-Irish emigrant to France. Despite her close engagement with the celebrated architectural circle in Paris during the 1910s and early 1920s, Gray has been long-overlooked and E.1027 has experienced many vicissitudes. Although the house survived the great peril of the Second World War, Eileen Gray’s authorship to it is continually threatened, and much of the specially designed furniture in the house has been lost with changes of ownership. Eileen Gray used her own work to make the inattentive traces of human habits visibly apparent. She cared about human life. The main subject of her designs is always the living human being: ‘Life, the sense of life, is my inspiration’. She built for the human body, attempting to nurture an equilibrium and balance all its parts. These conceptions were fully embodied in her furniture designs, expanding and growing into the architectural scale of E.1027. Understanding that the nature of human life is constituted out of habits and saturated with instinctive attitudes (‘the world is full of living allusions, living symmetries, hard to find, but real’), she spoke of dwelling as a living organism’... ‘a building is an emanation of some continuous life force, a romantic idea in which nature seems to manifest itself.’ She developed a conscious distinction between two types of work (one retreats back into practical life and the other stands out
as a flaunting object) aiming for a balance between the aesthetic and the practical where art establishes contact with unremarkable daily life. Art retreats into latency, but still functions as a fertile and suggestive field: ‘every work of art is symbolic. It conveys, it suggests the essential rather than representing it.’ The flat white concrete walls that comprise E.1027 parallels the white walls of the Suzhou gardens. They are both latent and active; their practical role is to define and reveal the complex array of everyday life in front of them. Hand in hand with Eileen Gray’s passion for the practical arts is her awareness of the peril of the spectacular object that requires a detached regard from a certain optimum distance, a matter of creating a look that captures attention. This eagerness for view, for aspect, was denounced by Gray: ‘We must mistrust merely pictorial elements if they are not assimilated by instinct. ...The interior plan should not be the incidental result of the façade.’ To understand art and architecture as an object to be seen, intellectual rationale and reflective judgments must be applied, while pre-reflective knowledge and experience are diminished or marginalised: ‘The poverty of modern architecture stems from the atrophy of sensuality.’ Wanting to ‘make some reality penetrate [modern architecture’s] abstraction’ she held onto to a more sustainable, durable level of manifestation, a foundational and ground substrate pertaining to its primordial and inner emanation out of life. This brings us to Le Corbusier’s 1938 murals inside the house, painted a decade after Eileen Gray abandoned E.1027 to Jean Badovicci, her partner in the late 1920s when the house was built. At the first glance Le Corbusier’s murals are also about everyday life, but in a much
more visible and clearly defined way – they are self-contained and theoretically eternal. This clamorous art demands a dramatically different manner of reading. Lines, dots, black white, everything is clear cut and geometrical. They are meant to be intellectually valid, an ideal and unambiguous status that seizes attention, eclipsing any possibility of mistaken distraction. They are meant to stand apart from their surroundings, and to be seen in their own right — a work that bears an author’s signature. As a monumental artistic work, the fresco stands out in this context risking the cohesive existence of tacit order. It concentrates on the thing itself, and occludes the surrounding world, darkening the very horizon on which the work of art is standing. It shall be noted that beyond the individual work itself, there is always a broader setting from which the art emerges. Under this condition, the white wall is conceived distinctively, intending to be a smooth, unified, plain and flat surface stripping off all its detail, cleansing of all darkness and disavowing any contamination. This is exactly part of Corbusier’s discourse on whiteness. He spoke of whiteness as ‘allowing the outline of things to stand out from the background’, a sort of X-ray beauty with supreme transparency. He believed that pure and immaculate white surface signifies an ideal status of completion, so that the truthful art of architecture – the interplay of volumes and masses – can be brought to light. In short, the contrast between Eileen Gray’s white and Le Corbusier’s white embodies two paradoxical attitudes towards art, Le Corbusier’s is representative and obtrusive, Gray’s is more submissive and attuned.
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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