Battle lines: E.1027

Colomina, Beatriz

doi:10.1080/14735789609366597

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…It is being faced with an utter lack of resistance, and insufficient visual friction close at hand, to meet the force of gravity. This is perhaps when size counts and the scalar difference between interior and landscape architecture are enacted as the distant image of the panorama, the horizonline to which Colomina (1996) attributes interiority, is shown to be inadequate containment. Its openness is abruptly atmospheric and alive to free fall.…”

Section: Seeing Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

In Suspension: Standing on Archaeology

McCarthy

2017

Space and Culture

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Glass floors require the trading of architectural intuition for faith in the invisible as structural. They heighten the awareness of standing above something; the refraction of glass, conveying a jewel-like preciousness; its reflections, momentary glimpses of solidity. In many in situ archaeological sites, glass floors reveal the gaps between body, weight, and archaeological feature; an awareness of the destructive power of gravity threatening the object of archaeology below. Standing on this “solid” air conveys supernatural levitation, but, at height, can also instil a disconcerting and visceral fear because the floor cannot be seen. The article examines architectural instances of glass, specifically in sites of art, tourism, and archaeology, and predominantly in floors, which suspend occupants above, or at least confuse the relationships between floor, feet, and standing. It is particularly interested in the difficulties of assuming that glass provides an uncomplicated visual relationship between viewers and in situ archaeology.

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Section: Seeing Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

In Suspension: Standing on Archaeology

McCarthy

2017

Space and Culture

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“…Gray's contribution to modern design and architecture has, until recently, been effectively erased from history. When E.1027 is mentioned, it and even some of its furniture is attributed to Le Corbusier (Adam, 2000;Colomina, 1996;Constant, 1994). When Le Corbusier publishes the murals, in My Work (1960b) and "Unité" (1948), he first renames her "Helen Grey" (which, as Colomina, 1996, notes, is the "first act of colonization" [p. 178]), and then, as though no longer reliant on material foundations, he leaves her name out entirely.…”

Section: Economies Of Desirementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It can be read as an attempt to both purge the poisonous alterity of the feminine and subsume her in this homosexual logic of fecundity, man's search for the boy. As Colomina (1996) notes, however, Le Corbusier has explained that the woman on the left is Gray, the woman on the right is Badovici, and the "woman" in the center is "the desired child, which was never born" (p. 171). 2 This mural might best be read, then, as Le Corbusier's confused grappling with Gray's nontotalizing, irreducible economy of desire.…”

Section: Economies Of Desirementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These are questions that Colomina (1996) touches on and around which my investigation into this relationship revolves. I have been struck by a sense of uncanny familiarity-a story never heard but known too well-and to return to approach this set of questions, I want to explore what sort of professional and political climate this admittedly tenuous relationship between Le Corbusier and Gray existed in.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…With his increasing proximity to E.1027, we can assume that Le Corbusier imagined his projects at Cap-Martin as a means to eventually occupying Gray's house. In the only essay to comprehensively explore Le Corbusier's excessive attention to the space of E.1027, Beatriz Colomina (1996) argues that Gray was a victim of colonial violence, enacted most covertly, here, through the gaze: "The imposition of this appropriating gaze is even more brutal if we remember that Gray had chosen the site because it was…'inaccessible and not overlooked from anywhere'" (p. 172). However, as Colomina notes, the violence had already been committed with the unauthorized murals.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Occupying E.1027

Rault

2005

Space and Culture

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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.

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Spectral Returns of Domesticity

Baydar

2003

Environ Plan D

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This is a study of the link between the house and the city, based on a close reading of three historical statements from Western urban theory by Leone Batisti Alberti, Le Corbusier, and Paul Virilio. Sexualized metaphors of the house as the feminine, private realm and the city as the masculine, public realm proliferate in the modern period. However, rather than conforming to this conventional opposition, these three authors define the city in terms of the house. Their statements provide a curious link across temporal and geographical boundaries, with significant theoretical implications. In all three cases both the feminine figure and themes of loss and death underlie the desire to project the ideal city. In this paper I argue that these themes intertwine in complicated ways to assert urban identification in terms of a masculine desire of total control and mastery by silencing the feminine figure.

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Battle lines: E.1027

Cited by 8 publications

References 2 publications

In Suspension: Standing on Archaeology

In Suspension: Standing on Archaeology

Occupying E.1027

Spectral Returns of Domesticity

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