2024-10-22 13:30:00
Villa E-1027 almost fell into disrepair, but today it is once again one of the most beautiful houses on the French Riviera. Architect Eileen Gray once built it as a symbol of love. But the modern villa was desecrated by its powerful competitor Le Corbusier.
Every document of culture is at the same time a document of barbarism, say Walter Benjamin’s historical-philosophical theses. In the case of Villa E-1027 the barbarian’s name was Le Corbusier. The Irish-born furniture designer Eileen Gray, who became known in Paris for a gallery and eccentric behavior, built between 1926 and 1929 on the coast of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, not far from Monaco, a house for the love between she and Jean Badovici, architect, editor of the authoritative magazine “L’Architettura Vivante” and 15 years her junior. At 51, it was his architectural debut and an epochal act.
E-1027 – the name is a pun on the lovers’ initials – was, on the one hand, unmistakably modernist: white blocks on thin stilts, unadorned facades, floor-to-ceiling windows, flat roof, pure form and unostentatious proportions, pomp and decoration. But at the same time, Gray’s building was a criticism of the principles of New Construction that Le Corbusier had proclaimed in his famous manifesto “Five points de l’architecture moderni” of 1923. For Gray, houses were organisms.
The people who lived in them did not have to conform to the rigid utopian ideas of their builders, but rather had the inviolable right to have their needs for privacy and comfort satisfied: “A house is not a living machine. It is the human shell, its expansion, its relief, its spiritual charisma”. The film “Eileen Gray and the house by the sea” by Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub now reconstructs the dramatic story of the architect and his villa.
Le Corbusier left obscene murals
E-1027 was actually a nest for two people who sometimes wanted to hide from the noise of the cities but also from each other. The rooms and furniture that Gray designed for her were intended to promote her physical and emotional well-being and allow for intimacy.
Architecture critic Niklas Maak: “As you enter the house, the rooms become darker and darker and eventually you find yourself in a bedroom with an almost black, intense blue wall. Almost like entering the sea from your home and swimming deeper and deeper into the dark blue water.”
But it happened as usual. The relationship with Baldovici broke down and Gray gave him the house to build a new one. He thanked her heartily: one of his closest friends was Le Corbusier, who evidently found it difficult to accept that a woman had built a perfectly modernist house like his, only more pleasant to live in.
So it was that in 1938 and 1939 he covered the white walls of Gray’s villa with murals, powerful frescoes with sometimes obscene motifs that he had painted naked – he had himself photographed while doing so. As British critic Rowan Moore noted in 2013, it was as if a dog had raised its paw. When Gray learned of this, she thought it was a desecration of her work and asked Baldovici to ask Le Corbusier to remove his “gift,” as he called it. It remained.
After Baldovici’s death, Le Corbusier tried in vain to acquire the villa, but managed to convince a wealthy Swiss furniture gallery owner to purchase it to save his frescoes. He himself built in the immediate vicinity where he spent his summers his famous bathing cabin, a small log cabin from which he could always see Gray’s mansion. When Le Corbusier suffered a heart attack and drowned while swimming in 1965, aged 77, E-1027 may have been the last thing he saw before sinking.
Gray’s own house almost did the same. Swiss left him to her doctor, who sold most of the furniture, organized orgies and was eventually murdered in the living room in 1996 by her two gardeners. It then became a haven for drug addicts and the homeless and continued to fall into disrepair. Until 1999, when the French state sensed and placed the area under monumental protection as “Cap Moderne” – ironically, mainly because of the murals and Le Corbusier’s holiday home.
House completely vandalized
It took more than 20 years for the house of Gray, who died in Paris in 1976 at the age of 98, to return to how she built it. The restoration work proved difficult. The photos show a completely dilapidated and vandalized house.
Most of Gray’s original furniture had become inaccessible; One of his designs, the “Fauteuil aux dragon” of 1918/19, achieved an auction price of 21.9 million euros at the auction of Yves Saint Laurent’s estate at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2009, many times the budget for the entire project.
A first restoration attempt, completed in 2013, was unsuccessful. Those responsible made do with the wrong materials and the wrong colors or installed 21st century light switches, as if they were just trying to make a rough impression – but one of the nice things about the E-1027 is how much care and consideration They really put into it every little detail was there. In recent years the repair business has been carried out a second time, this time with the dedication and meticulousness that Grays Villa deserves.
In 2021, the initiative responsible for the restoration announced that E-1027 now looked like it did in 1929 again. This is not entirely true, because Le Corbusier’s surviving murals – which are also listed buildings – have not been removed . However, when you visit, you can’t help but be amazed by Gray’s clever ideas.
The window above the sofa to admire the sunrise in winter; the passage in the ceiling above the counter to allow the light to illuminate the bottles; the tea table, covered with cork so as not to hear the noise of the dishes; the positioning of the fireplace near a large glass door so that two types of light could be seen at the same time; maritime colours; the safe management of limited space in the kitchen; the famous height-adjustable table, designed by her so that guests should be able to eat in bed without having to lie down on crumbs: the human-scale ideas don’t stop there. It’s as if Eileen Gray wanted to prove that even houses can love you.
The house is listed as a national monument of France upon registration to visit. The documentary will be released on October 24, 2024 “E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the beach house” at the cinema. It tells the story of the architect and his villa on the French Riviera.
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