1994
In the winter of 1995 when Ethel was at the café de la renaissance at the top of Castellar, she asked the autoctone if they knew the house of Eileen Gray, the one that is down the hill. One of the women started to talk about it, saying that it wasn't worth trying to visit it; that it is horrible and looks like a medical laboratory of analyses. The idea fascinated us that perhaps the furniture as well as the interior spaces of the modern movement were influenced by the medical world.
The question of hygiene and sanitary spaces is embedded in modernism, especially Le Corbusier. "On fait propre chez soi : il n'y a plus nulle part de coin sale, ni de coin sombre : tout se montre comme ca est...Quand l'ombre et les coins noirs vous entourent, vous n'êtes chez vous que jusqu'à la limite trouble de ces zones obscures que votre regard ne perce pas. Le lait de chaux." (Le Corbusier, L'Art Dˇcoratif d'Aujoud'hui, 191). Cleanliness was used as an agent in the war against disease. Sterility was seen as a cure for slums. Eileen critiqued this type of hygiene. "Oui ! De l'hygiene à en mourir ! De l'hygiène mal comprise. Car l'hygiène n'exclut ni le confort ni l'activité. Non, ils sont intoxiqués par le machinisme. Le monde est peuplé d'allusions vivantes, de symétries vivantes, difficiles à découvrir, mais réelles. Leur excès d'intellectualité veut supprimer ce qu'il y a de merveilleux dans la vie, comme leur souci mal compris de l'hygiène rend l'hygiène insupportable" (Gray & Badovici, 20).
Hygiene is interrelated with both medicine and cleanliness of the body, the spaces of the street and the city. Cleanliness had not always been understood as a cure for disease. In the Medieval period cleanliness was associated only with visible portions of the body (hands and face). Water was used only on the body's public façade. At the beginning of the 19th century, hygiene came to define not only bodily health, but the environment which influenced the health of a place or population. Good circulation of water, air and light in the cities started to be considered a way to fight cholera [1832]. At the same time, renovation of the sewers in Paris were considered but still hesitating. In 1852 public baths and laundries were created. At the end of the 19th century, the discovery of bacteria by Remlinger revealed the invisibility of disease and confirmed the need for an a intimate cleanliness (Georges Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, 229). Taking a bath was becoming a more common and private act at the beginning of the 20th century as bathrooms became increasingly popular within the bourgeois home. Hygiene was a bridge between the space of medicine and disease prevention, and cleanliness. Valery likens his architect to a surgeon (Valery, 73). Water, within the context of hygienic modernism, was primarily a tool for environmental sterilization.
Eileen opposed the view that water was principally a consequence of the care of hygiene. She understood it also as the ultimate pleasure of the body, particularly in warm countries. Still, she drew upon the architecture of hygiene. When we look at the furniture of medical spaces, we find that they move easily, rotate, fold and are transformable. They incorporate hinges, pulleys, wheels. They were often constructed of tubular metal . The interior spaces were usually covered with tiles for rapid cleaning. All these points are visible in E1027 and even more developed in Tempe a Pailla. The tubular furniture is mixed with other types of materials. Tiles are differentiated in color and size gives diversity and creates intensity and life.
The bathrooms of E.1027 are punctuated by a similar diversity and flexibility. Always, the house is entered past the bath. The single bath located at the center of Villa Savoye is multiplied, pressed to the limits. The private is entered through the more private. Traditional hierarchies of privacy and publicity are reversed. Water becomes another kind of window, a fluid opening onto the sensual realm of the interior. The bathroom mediates between the bed and the sea. It brings the sea into the house, sets it in motion, and employs it to dress the inhabitant in liquid robes. The traditionally unauthored space of the bath is sensually signed.
In Dialogues Deleuze recalls the work he is in the process of making with Guattari. "Nous étions que deux. mais ce qui comptait pour nous, c'était moins de travailler ensemble, que ce fait étrange de travailler entre les deux. On cessait d'être "auteur'" (Deleuze, Parnet,Dialogues, 23,24). E.1027 is an architecture without a singular author, without origin and without end. The house is in a perpetual stage of devenir. It grew simultaneously out of the pages of the journal and the terraces of its site. It was designed to be transformed, and after it was inhabited its design was repeatedly transformed. Its walls gained additional layers and signatures, including that of Le Corbusier, the first literally to write his name on E.1027's walls (though not the last). The house has, in recent years, re-occupied the museums' walls, the pages of architecture journals, and now web sites, more layers of dialogue superimposed on the walls. Like her early lacquer work with its infinite layers, the many readings of the house give the architecture more and more depth, more varied surfaces for exploring different points of view. This project is for us very much in a continuous stage of devenir. The dialogue that started on the work of Eileen Gray initially theorized her architecture toward a major architecture, part of the cannon. As we continued to write between our individual voices, we came to think she also had little interest in playing "auteur," and a minor language began to surface simultaneously for us between her walls and our words.
