The little white house at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, which sits amid craggy rock face, azure water probing at its boundaries, has lived through more than its fair share of destruction in its time. Most recently this was mere neglect, the inevitable wear and tear to a building whose primary occupants were squatters and whose situation – at an exposed lip of land and sea – invites the elements to wreak their own unabashed, uncontrollable havoc. In the 1960s, the house was the scene of a murder, its then-custodian having been found stabbed in a pool of blood on the tiled floor, and two decades earlier German soldiers had taken over the compound and used its elegant features for target practice.
But the most egregious insult hurled at this fine building came in the 1930s, when, over a number of years, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier daubed its walls with eight murals. The paintings are irritatingly good – somewhere between Picasso and Miró – but many people believe their creation to be an act of depraved desecration, even sexual violence.
To understand this framing, we must first understand the house. Completed in 1929, E 1027 was the first fully realised building of the Irish designer Eileen Gray, who died 50 years ago this October. Gray had established herself as a designer of individual pieces – works in lacquer, woven rugs, carved lamps – before working up to rooms and then, with E-1027 and by this time aged 50, whole buildings. Although several of her furniture designs are now considered classics, including the ‘Bibendum’ and ‘Transat’ chairs, it’s E-1027 that’s the real masterpiece. Flat-roofed, supported by pilotis, and with interior fixtures that can be moved according to need, E-1027 reads at first glance as typical of the International Modernist style, and yet, while Gray certainly borrowed elements from the movement and its predecessors, in fact it is more apt to place the house within a canon of work being produced by Left Bank women in the interwar period, which established modes of expression for a newly emerging non-heteronormative identity.
Although it was designed with, and for, a man – the architect Jean Badovici – E-1027 was the product of a milieu in which female practitioners of various mediums were expressing gender and sexual non-conformity through their art, initiating for the first time aesthetic codes that still continue to inform our interpretation of these identities today. Among Gray’s circle, Gertrude Stein experimented with language and narrative structure to reappraise and refashion the domestic, female same-sex relationship in literature. The painter Romaine Brooks created a new visual language for lesbian presentation with her depictions of consciously androgynous women rendered in muted tones. Through her salon, Natalie Clifford Barney cultivated a fertile space for critical discussion of the Sapphic experience. And Eileen Gray. She utilised an almost Wildean horror vacui in her interior design for E-1027 – sensual textures and tactile fabrications that could be read as an homage to fin-de-siècle decadence and was certainly antithetical to Le Corbusier’s austere purism (indeed he perceptively described such decoration elsewhere as ‘quasi-orgastic’).
At every turn E-1027 invites one to languor and to luxuriate – it is a space designed for repose, with all consideration given to both comfort and practicality: consider the ‘Satellite’ mirror, or the adjustable, tubular table designed for eating breakfast in bed. There is an interplay between privacy and visibility, and an androgyny to the house that echoes the way Gray and her contemporaries were contriving their own bodies at the time – no gendered spaces like a study or a boudoir, instead something much more fluid. Simultaneously however, there is a quote from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal on the wall at the very centre of the house – perhaps the most overt reference to the femmes nouvelles and ‘degenerate’ or ‘inverted’ female desire.
Gray herself considered a house as ‘the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation’, in rather stark contrast to Le Corbusier’s more prosaic ‘house as a machine for living’. It’s fair to say that the metaphor, of dwelling as a living organism, held some deep fascination for the latter, and, although contemporary feminist scholarship is rightly keen to disengage Gray’s legacy with that of Le Corbusier, in a way his attack on E-1027 – which, incidentally, he undertook nude – is a significant entry point to understanding Gray’s objective as a designer. Namely to create a new kind of domestic refuge for a new kind of woman.
E-1027 Sent. Massolin, 06190 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. Visit capmoderne.monuments-nationaux.fr
