Occupying E.1027

Abstract

This article deals with the relationship between Le Corbusier and lesser known modern designer and architect Eileen Gray as it plays itself out in Le Corbusier’s fixation on and eventual occupation of Eileen Gray’s first house, E.1027. In 1938 and 1939, Le Corbusier painted eight massive murals in E.1027. Gray was horrified. Her biographer, Peter Adam, describes it in terms of sexual assault: “It was a rape.” What lines of inquiry are opened if one begins to think of Le Corbusier’s proximity, his eventual intimacy with Gray’s house and interiors as enactments of sexual violence? Why this compulsion to see, to mark, and eventually to be inside? The author argues that Gray develops, in her design and architecture, an aesthetic of desire that radically challenges the particular modern movement that Le Corbusier championed and epitomized. One can begin to read the violence toward Gray and E.1027 as covert, perhaps even unconscious, disciplinary responses to the aesthetic, philosophical, and sexual threat that her work represented.