Gray, Eileen (1879–1976)
November 8, 2009 | In: Architectural History
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Best known for her lacquer work, carpet weaving, and interior design, Eileen Gray built several architectural projects in the early years of the twentieth century. Despite her lack of a formal architectural education, her sketches and drawings show an understanding of architectural space, and her buildings, a sensitivity for materials.
Gray was born in Ireland as Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith. Her higher education began at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. In 1902, she moved to Paris to study drawing, and the same year encountered the restoration of antique lacquer with D. Charles in London. Having inherited sufficient wealth to be independent, in 1907 she returned to Paris to work with the Japanese lacquer master, Seizo Sugawara. By 1910, Gray established a lacquer workshop and a weaving atelier. She opened a decorating shop called Jean Désert in 1922, receiving commissions for interior design. Near this time, she met Jean Badovici, an architectural critic and editor who had received formal education in architecture. He encouraged her talents in architecture and between 1926 and 1929 she built a house for herself and Badovici in the south of France at Roquebrune. Literature establishes that they collaborated on this house, but that Gray designed the project and Badovici’s role was that of critic (Constant and Wang, 1996). The house was titled E. 1027 Maison en bord de mer. Located on the shore, the design reflected Le Corbusier’s tenets of modern architecture. The house was set on piloti, organized in an open plan with a terrace overlooking the sea. Gray designed the furniture, successfully integrating it with the architecture. Her architectural work includes another house for herself, the Tempe à pailla in Castellar, several apartment renovations in Paris, and numerous unbuilt projects (Hecker and Müller, 1993; Constant, 2000; Constant and Wang, 1996).
This sketch dates approximately from the 1930s and presents a plan for an art gallery (Constant and Wang, 1996). It references alterations made for her Vacation and Leisure Center (Exhibition Pavilion) in Le Corbusier’s Pavilion des Temps Nouveaux. The pencil sketch shows a ruled floor plan with a small section to the right and a faint elevation on the left. The page contains several notes, dimensions, proportional guidelines, and an outlined lozenge shape. This approximate ellipse constitutes the spatial theme of the project, and reflects her concept for circulation through the space.
In a fairly small room, Gray was studying sophisticated solutions to lighting the surfaces of the exhibition. The section shows a diagram for light to be emitted from a clerestory. The skylights, situated directly above the sculptures in the center, provide an additional source of illumination. The openings in the walls have been set at forty-five degree angles to experiment with reflected light bouncing off diagonal surfaces.
Gray was walking through the experience of the space with her pencil. She used arrows for the intended direction of the visitors’ movement. She also employed wavy parallel lines to express the width of the flow around and between the display panels. In this way, she was visually questioning the scale of the spaces. This also provided an indication of the way observers would perceive the exhibition panels.
This zigzag path was a method to move people through the gallery and to provide as much wall area for artwork as possible. Understanding how artwork requires indirect illumination, Gray could envision the light permeating the space from behind the visitors by inhabiting the sketch herself. Sketched lightly in the center she even locates the placement of these objects. The development and evaluation of the project occurred as she sketched and allowed her to project herself into the proposed interior space.
