Eileen Gray had a predilection for small rooms. She wanted to complicate interiors in a Modernist direction without neglecting comfort, familiarity, sensuality. Thus her architecture and designs strive to be both mobile and livable, articulating both the sedentary feel of the...
[more]Eileen Gray had a predilection for small rooms. She wanted to complicate interiors in a Modernist direction without neglecting comfort, familiarity, sensuality. Thus her architecture and designs strive to be both mobile and livable, articulating both the sedentary feel of the home and the ambulant, incessantly shifting milieu of the vagrant.
Gray was always an outsider, decentered, speaking in foreign tongues. She was born in Ireland in 1878, but lived and worked in France for most of her life. Moving among mediums -- from lacquer to rugs, furniture to entire houses -- she cultivated a sensibility that itself expressed movement and flexibility.
Having studied lacquer work in London, while a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, Gray found inspiration on a trip to Paris in the form of master lacquer craftsman Sugiwara-san, who trained her in Japanese techniques. The difficult medium transfixed her for several years -- she developed a striking pallet of colors and understated shapes, distinctly different from the wavy, leaf-like lines of many contemporary, Art Nouveau-influenced products. Eventually she moved into furniture, creating tables and chairs out of slim tubular steel. These clean, minimal designs were adjustable and could assume several functions: a desk might become a cabinet; a chair could metamorphose into a stepladder. In 1921 she opened her first store in Paris.
Gray's work evolved through her contact with the De Stijl designers then dominating European Modernism. While her furniture retained strong elements of the organic, it began to combine these with pure geometric forms: a chair might employ a simple, black bracket frame, yet be upholstered in animal hide. By melding the formal with the playful and natural, Gray avoided the aseptic extremes of De Stijl but consitently provided elegant, clean lines.
In 1926 Gray began designing a house in the south of France with the help of Jean Badovici. The two lived on site for two years, working in direct contact with the builders. Their ideas evolved as the house took shape: designs were scribbled on unfinished walls; rooms were renovated as the process of living revealed new needs. The space that emerged from this design process exemplifies Gray's vision of the house itself: an architecture that facilitates incessant travel.
Gray went on to design other interiors -- an apartment for Badovici and a second home for herself. These spaces repeated, in a sense, the life of their architect, an itinerant outsider intent on folding herself in while retaining the pleasures of passage.
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