Eileen Gray: E.1027, 1926-1929

With this seventh O'Neil Ford Monograph the O'Neil Ford Chair in Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin is finally placing a key example of modern architecture to its rightful position in history. This volume includes essays, reproductions of archival material belonging to the Eileen Gray Archive of the National Museum of Ireland and the Eileen Gray Archive of the Victoria & Albert Museum, some published for the first time, photographs and numerous scale drawings of reconstructed designs of items in E.1027. The compact white elongated vacation residence cryptically called E.1027 is perched on the rocky coast of the Côte d'Azur. To this day, it draws the views of passers-by along the Moyenne Corniche, the narrow and winding coastal road along the Mediterranean Sea. The Anglo-Irish designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976) bought the site, paid for the construction and, as her first foray into architecture, designed it with assistance of her close friend at the time, Jean Badovici, to whom Gray gave the site, building and contents. E.1027 was a manifesto, the kernel of Gray's subsequent social and architectural projects for vacation and cultural centers. For Gray E.1027 was an experiment with entirely new concepts of both compact and expansive spatial relations, and not simply the more well-known aspects of furniture design such as the legendary eponymous circular adjustable occasional table. On close inspection, E.1027 is the first example of an architecture embracing an Ionic sensibility, which is an architecture concerned with both a sense of lightness, freedom and growth while at the same time being composed along discreet rules such as golden section proportions. Gray's loose and fitted pieces of furniture were intended to engage the occupants of E.1027; they transformed them while they were in turn subconsciously transformed by them. Semi-circular wardrobes, rotating reading tables and rounded corners indicated movement patterns. Gray designed these as