Eileen Gray
The Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray was born in 1878 to a Scottish-Irish aristocratic family in Enniscorthy, Ireland, and studied from 1898 to 1902 as one of the first women to do so at the Slade School of Art in London. Through painting, she came to Japanese and Chinese lacquer art, which she transferred to lacquer furniture and screens after moving to Paris in 1907, works that were strongly influenced by late Art Nouveau and Japonism.
With these first design objects Gray began her career as a designer in Paris in the 1920s, a city where she moved in avant-garde and lesbian circles. Together with Evelyn Wyld Gray founded a shop in Paris in 1922 under the male pseudonym Jean Désert, where she exhibited and sold her designs. Her work was appreciated by prominent personalities such as the fashion designer Jacques Doucet.
Villa E.1027 - Eileen Gray's architectural masterpiece
From the 1920s onwards, Eileen Gray increasingly turned to architecture,a move encouraged by her partner Jean Badovici, a Romanian architect and editor of the magazine "L'Architecture Vivante".
Summer residence of Eileen Gray and her partner Jean Badovici
Details E.1027 from the outside including the garden shower and a view of the Unités de Camping by Le Corbusier behind it
Between 1925 and 1929 Gray designed and built the house E.1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera for herself and Badovici, a work she referred to as "my boat". With the name, a composition of E for Eileen, 10 for Jean (the tenth letter of the alphabet), 2 for Badovici and 7 for Gray, she created a monument to her short relationship with Badovici. And also developed a prime example of modern architecture, a work which convinces with both its aesthetic sensitivity and its coherent spatial and usage plan. Eileen Gray designed not only the building, but also numerous built-in furniture and individual pieces that made and make E.1027 an unmistakable work of art, including the eponymous E.1027 side table, today one of the most famous design classics of classical modernism.
Eileen Gray designed the Adjustable Table E 1027 for the house of the same name – here as a table for breakfast in bed
Gray's Bibendum Armchair, also designed by her for the villa
The house quickly gained fame and reknown, and also inspired the famous architect Le Corbusier. After the end of the relationship between Gray and Badovici, the house passed to Badovici in 1932, and Eileen Gray never returned. As Badovici's guest, Le Corbusier created seven to eight large-format coloured murals inside and outside the house during numerous summer stays in 1938 and 1939. Eileen Gray saw these paintings as vandalism and an intrusion on her design. This seems all the more understandable when you consider that Eileen Gray summed up her understanding of architecture in contrast to Le Corbusier's concept of the "living machine" as follows: "A house is not a machine, it is the housing, the shell of man, his expansion, his liberation, his spiritual charisma."
Some also suspect that Le Corbusier was jealous of the building, which so cleverly combined the principles of modern architecture. The legendary incident is still a topic of conversation today.
Le Corbusier decorated the walls with murals that are still controversial today
The house bar by Eileen Gray
Eileen Gray's design language was focused on functionality, but interpreted the concept very artistically. In this respect Gray clearly distanced herself from the standardization of forms and manufacturing methods demanded by many modernists such as Le Corbusier. She cleverly used innovative materials such as tubular steel, glass and lacquer for her furniture designs. For Gray, furniture and architecture were inseparably linked: many pieces were designed specifically for the rooms in which they were to be used. The focus was always on meeting human needs such as comfort and ergonomics.
Clear and minimalist in glass and tubular steel, Eileen Gray's Adjustable Table E.1027
With House E.1027 Gray created a modern, functional home that reflected the lifestyle of the avant-garde of the time while at the same time focusing on the comfort and needs of the residents. For example, a seat for visitors was installed in front of the bathtub in one of the house's three bathrooms, so that the bather could relax and chat. The pool also serves more as a communication element - you couldn't swim here, just sit down and cool off - an ideal place for a pastis in the Mediterranean sun. The house was intended to be a space in which nature, sea and light merge harmoniously with architecture and design.
Bathroom with communicative seating in house E.1027
The pool was also designed for communal sitting with a pastis in the Mediterranean sun
From the 1930s Eileen Gray lived in seclusion in Paris and in her second house on the Côte d'Azur, Tempe a Pailla. She continued to sell furniture in small editions, which were highly regraded, but was increasingly forgotten until she was rediscovered after her death in 1976 and her works achieved record prices at auctions, such as her "Serpent Chair", which was sold for 21.9 million euros.
In the 1970s, Gray began a collaboration with the British designer Zeev Aram to bring her furniture and lamps to series production. In 1973 she transferred the worldwide rights to the production and distribution of her designs to his company. In 1972 she was named ‘Royal Designer for Industry’ by the Royal Society of Art in London, and her ‘Adjustable Table’ was added to the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978. A major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2013 and the restoration of the house E.1027 made her known to a wider audience again.
...Plus que tout" reflected Eileen Gray in 1973, 'I've always loved architecture... 1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea writers and directors Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub explore not just the biography of E...
Paris An Île; A Commune; A Context For all that the contemporary island of Paris has a long tradition of furniture production and usage, the greater part of that history, as can be read in the Bossu de Notre Dame, the oldest relic and most reliable witness of...
...Eileen Gray - Bard Graduate Center Gallery Online In 2020 the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York, staged an exhibition of the work and life of the Irish/French designer and architect Eileen Gray; an exhibition which, invariably in 2020, not only found its run limited, but also couldn't be viewed by as international an audience as Eileen Gray deserves... In addition to detailed discussions on projects and works by Gray both well known and less well known, discussions primarily undertaken through concise texts and copious photographs, Eileen Gray @ the Bard Graduate Center Gallery Online also provides for a very succinct, if both thorough and broad, introduction to the person Eileen Gray and her biography; even if it is missing the story about Eileen Gray and Marisa Damia cruising the boulevards of 1920s Paris in Damia's convertible and with Damia's pet panther on the back seat...
..."Wow" notes, Hana Sonnenschein in a scene from David Mazzucchelli's 2009 graphic novel Asterios Polyp, as she scans the eponymous professor's apartment, "Modern" And with its mix of works by Marcel Breuer, Le Corbuiser, Eileen Gray, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi, etc, etc, etc, there is no arguing with the apartment's European inter-War and American mid-century modernist credentials... As is the comment by an Eileen Gray sideboard that "This place is just one big boys' club...
...That's my idea of good design" We recite this tale here principally to amuse ourselves, but also by way of a gentle introduction to the new smow Eileen Gray range... Although for many Gray's work will not as familiar as that of Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe one should not underestimate the contribution made by Eileen Gray to the development furniture design in the 20th century...
