1994

"De l'Eclectisme au Doute," introduces readers of L'Architecture Vivante to E1027 through a written dialogue between Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici. It is the only text she is known to have contributed in constructed towards publication. The voices of Gray and Badovici appear distinct at the beginning of the text (to the point that Adam in translation inserts identifying initials G, B) (Adam, 232). The dialogue is at first constructed as an interview. But as we enter the view, moving between two views, the voices become blurred. If we had at one point been able to identify a major and minor speaker (interviewee/er) the roles become mistreated, the rules are rendered optional (Deleuze, Guattari, 131). The text becomes a collective assemblage. One cannot identify the speaker. Each inhabits the other as the voices become completely intertwined. The interview is also a viewing the inside, a movement towards a less regulated ground.

Badovici was born in Rumania in 1893. He studied in Paris at the Beaux Arts and at l'école supérieure d'architecture. In great contrast to Eileen, architecture dominated his background as major language, academically authenticated. The published journal at this time was crucial in shaping the world of architecture, diffusing new ideas and concepts, publicizing young architects. Le Corbusier knew that perfectly and started to publish with Ozenfant L'Esprit Nouveau from 1920-1925, treating architecture, painting, science, music and poetry. The journal De Stijl, started in 1916, was highly influential internationally. In 1923, Badovici convinced the editor Albert Morancé to start the journal L'Architecture Vivante, which published 21 issues over the following decade. This journal quickly became the most avant-garde French publication on Modern architecture, publishing the work of the Bauhaus, Constructivism, de Stijl, Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier plays a particularly prominent role in the journal after L'Esprit Nouveau ceased publication. Badovici also collaborated with the hollandish journal Wendingen and later with Cahiers d'Art created by his friend Christian Zervos in 1926.

Dialogue was not new to Badovici's publications. He used this form of construction in Intérieurs Francais [Paris1925] and in earlier issues of L'Architecture Vivante (There is a possiblity that Eileen's voice may have been present (invisibly, unacknowledged) in these earlier written dialogues). Dialogue is entertained by Badovici; he controls the rhythm of it. He uses it to move from publication to publication, to draw connections, to enter varied published architects into dialogue not only with himself but with each other. He was the writer, but also the co-editor of the journal, its visible and invisible author. He also outlined the program of E 1027; it too had a collective writing as its inception, an in between (inter-) view.

Writing for Gray, in direct contrast, was a kind of foreign language. The manifesto, essential to Le Corbusier and Loos in their self-promotion as architectural practitioners, was alien to the development of her architecture and ideas. Valery, who wrote frequently in the form of dialogue, describes the genre in his notebooks. "Dialogue is the operation that transforms certain givens by exchange groups. The number of variables that enter into play is itself variable. At the base of this operation is the interior dialogue. Monologue does not exist. Because thought tends towards dialogue, and is only monologue in appearance, it can be elucidated by this operation. In other words dialogue is a process of exchange... an all encompassing web of exchange"(Paul Valery, quoted by Sarah Whiting in "Voices Between the Lines: Talking in the Gray Zone," transcribed from Eileen Gray symposium at GSD, 10 December 1994). Monologue does not exist; it is an artificial construct employed in the manifesto to hide any minor contestations. Modernism as manifesto is an equally artificial construct, to which the underpublished contributions of Charlotte Perriand and Lily Reich to the work of Le Corbusier and Mies also attest.

Gray positions herself inhabiting the manifesto, pluralizing its language to promote a reading of minor architectural possibilities for her work. The title, "L'Eclectisme au Doute," specifically suggests a Deleuzian reading, proposing a movement between excess and impoverishment. "Mais comment exprimer une époque, et surtout une époque comme la nôtre, si pleine de contradictions, où, d'autre part, on voit tant d'affirmations outrancières? "(Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, "De l'Eclectisme au Doute," L'Architecture Vivante (Winter 1929): 18). The text critiques the poverty of contemporary French standards of luxury, "the old oppression," as well as the poverty of contemporary modernist standards of mechanization and hygiene. "Mais cet froideur intellectuelle à laquelle on était arrivée qui ne traduisait que trop bien les dures lois du mécanisme moderne, ne peuvent être qu'un passage." Artists work within the sphere of excess, "in this multitude of contradictory elements," towards collective value, "one that gives intellectual and emotional support to both the individual and the social man"(Adam, 233). Major architecture is criticized for denying the personal in its political constructions. "Exterior architecture seems to have interested avant-garde architects at the expense of the interior" (Adam, 233). Gray seeks this internal experience. "-Tu veux dire en somme, retrouver l'émotion. -Oui , une émotion purifiée et qui peut s'exprimer de mille facons...le seul choix d'une matière belle en soi, et travaillée avec une simplicité sincère y suffit quelquefois." The simple surface is folded into a thousand facets; excess and lack cohabit within the "unité organique." It is no longer just the unity of the outside but foremost one of inside. From the unity of the inside Eileen expresses the interior life. Major architecture, promoted in the published journal, is inhabited as a means of deterritorialization. Its signature is doubled, plagiarized, so that even the original is rendered full of doubt. Its rules are confronted as the interview opens a space for viewing another side, reading another surface. This other writing materializes in the stenciled texts of E1027's surfaces, published on the pages which followed.