Eileen Gray - Maison en Bord de Mer (E.1027) Facts

• The villa was an attempt to adapt to become a welcoming gesture in the architecture to help communicate to people to encourage them and help them to adopt to the cold, stark modernism.
• This building was her first building she ever designed and got built. As such this building represents the embodiment of her life and her broad and deep artistic understanding.
• Eileen Gray largely taught herself architecture through the study of contemporary works - most significantly Adolf Loo's Villa Moissi in 1923. From the study of this building she was able to recognise the importance of the independence of volumes and the privacy within a compact entity. this later was reinterpreted in E.1027.
• E.1027 - the name is a testimony for Grays' private nature and also a light hearted poke at the machinist aspects of modernism.
• It was designing as a maison minimum - "a house envisaged from a social point of view, minimum space, maximum of comfort" - simple, yet efficient.
• As seen from the arrangement of public and private spaces it is a house largely designed for independence and study, but sufficiently large to welcome a group of friends and entertain them in comfort.
• The architectural forms play nicely against the topography of the site. The building is rotated to adjust and continue to play with Eileen Gray's idea of an irregularly of grid systems.
• The division between outdoor and indoor space is deliberately eroded.
• There is further ironic commentary on the contemporary obsession with machine imagery. This wasn't just a poke in the eye to the speed of the machine age - it was also a genuine warning that the circulation through E.1027 requires consideration as there is more than just one route.
• The interior merges with the exterior and the exterior is respectful of its location.
• Eileen Gray designing the building from the inside out - the comforts of her occupants was a secondary consideration.
• The design is an off grid design with no real geometry, with intertwining wall systems.