Now, Gray is the inspiration for a new exhibition at ArtCenter College of Design's Mullin Gallery in Pasadena ( read the LA Times review). Though the 1967 Domus article properly credited her for the villa, it would be several more years, when Gray was in her nineties, before she received wider acclaim for the whole of her career-spanning contributions. “By the time architectural interest emerged in E-1027, Badovici and Corbusier had seemingly written out of her own project,” Jennifer Goff, the National Museum of Ireland curator, told Artnet. In other instances, the house was credited as primarily the work of Badovici. His murals led to the house being mistakenly credited to him, a misattribution he never bothered to correct.
Le Corbusier’s self-imposition on E-1027 had lasting effects. “He couldn’t get over the fact that a woman could produce such a wonderful work on her own without a man standing next to her, sort of guiding her,” said designer Zeev Aram. After Badovici separated from Gray in 1932, he remained the sole occupant of the house and, against Gray’s wishes, invited Le Corbusier to paint the bare walls. Le Corbusier, a close friend of Badovici, was reportedly obsessed with E-1027. “I was not a pusher,” she readily acknowledged, “and maybe that's the reason I did not get the place I should have had.”īut the story behind E-1027 represents her most significant erasure from history. Uncomfortable with self-promotion and reluctant to exhibit her work after an early harsh review, Gray had largely refrained from publishing the type of manifestos that cemented the reputations of many male architects. Yet, despite E-1027’s being heralded as her masterpiece at the time, subsequently, the world seemed to have forgotten about Gray until 1967, when the Italian design magazine Domus published a story on her. “Both houses are more livable and more sensitive to human needs and desires than any works by Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe.”
“Most critics would now agree that E-1027 and Tempe à Pailla constitute major achievements in humanizing and enriching the principles of modernism,” said Tim Benton, emeritus professor of art history at the Open University in England, who has written extensively about E-1027 and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Composed of tubular steel, it featured a semicircular base that fit around a bedpost and an adjustable surface made not of glass but a more lightweight celluloid. The E-1027 table, for example, perhaps Gray's most recognizable work, was designed for her sister to eat breakfast in bed without getting crumbs in the sheets. These designs were tailored to unique personal needs and particular storage or room requirements. Now a museum, thanks to extensive conservation work recently completed by nonprofit Cap Moderne through the Getty Foundation’s Keeping It Modern initiative, E-1027 is a marvel of personal customization, featuring an astonishing 300 bespoke fittings, fixtures, and furniture designs. Gray’s approach to modernism was instead grounded in lived lives. Many early 20th-century modernist efforts fell short of this stated goal, however, accounting for people’s use of designed objects almost as an afterthought. The house was an embodiment of the spirit of avant-garde modernism, specifically its guiding principle: " form follows function." A building should be designed around its purpose a home should be custom built to fit the needs of those who live inside of it.
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