The sea. E.1027: Maison en bord de mer -- the water is already implicated in the title. The sea forms an endless planar surface framed by all Mediterranean constructions. The house looks onto the bay , this incredible intense blue expanse of water, edged by the coast-mountain of Monaco. From inside the house this view of the sea is framed by the awning and banister draped with fabric, resembling the deck of a ship. Seascape is articulated as horizontal ribbon; the horizon line architectonically reproduced. The sea is not only a framed view but a figure which starts progressively to slide inside the house. Eileen painted in blue carpets and bed on the black & white photograph of the main living room. The endless horizontal surface of the sea is embedded in the horizontal layers of the house. The sea is also present within the house's verticals layers. The navigation chart of the Caribbean on the northern wall mirrors the view of Mediterranean pictured on the southern windows. The title of an 1869 Baudelaire poem "L'invitation au voyage" is superimposed on the chart. The text seems to describe the house.
"it is there we must go to breathe, to dream, and to prolong the hours in an infinity of sensations. All the furniture... is armed with locks and secrets like all civilized souls. Mirrors, metals, fabrics, pottery and works of the goldsmith's art play a symphony for the eye, every crack, every corner, every drawer and curtain's fold breathes forth a curious perfume, a perfume of Sumatra whispering come back, which is the soul of the abode"(Quoted in Constant, 278)
The house is not only the prolongation of the sea but becomes the ship with all the prosthesis required for navigation. The mechanical aspect of E.1027 is given by the stencils that are poché on the surface of some of the walls. Stencils were used on the walls of a ship because they would not delaminate with constant exposure to the sea, an exposure to which E. 1027 also was susceptible. Like an instructions sheet unfurled along the path of the inhabitant, the words recall the directions for passengers on a ship. The house is designed for the guest, to make the guest feel at home or to make even the permanent resident feel a guest. The estrangement and disorientation of modern life are written on the walls of the house. The labels help to orient us; the house is our guide, our "invitation au voyage."
Gray's inscribed surfaces make us feel a foreigner within our own language of architecture and domesticity. The house invites voyage towards a minor architecture. (note: The interpretation that follows is based closely on Jennifer Bloomer's outline of Deleuze/Guattari's concept of minor literature in "D'OR," Sexuality and Space, Beatriz Colomina, ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992): 179). Eileen identifies herself as a foreigner to architecture, lacking academic training, uncomfortable with drawing and manifesto-writing. Her repetitive acts of drawing and writing on the walls of the house mark a reterritorialization of those surfaces and codes. The political text for her cannot be distinguished from the personal boundaries of the private home. Each surface is labeled as foreign, cloaking unknown contents which require written translation. Each is itself a collective assemblage, both wall and furniture, with multiple forms and uses, multiple materials. Each is indebted to a collective audience of builders, the craftsmen with whom she lived on site for two years, Badovici and the modernists whom she studied, the craftswomen of North African colonies who originally taught her the language of rug-making. As we interact with these collective assemblages, architecture as a major language is deterritorialized, its surfaces rendered with lack (lacque).
The circular stair pins the horizontal layers of the house together like as a vertical anchor. Concealed within the house's interior on the ground and first floor, on the roof it becomes the most visible feature of the house, like a mast or captain's desk. Or we might see it as a lighthouse -- no longer the ship itself but directing the naval traffic over which it looks.
"Quant au caractère marin de la maison il découlait inévitablement, de l'ambiance, des matériaux imposés par cette ambiance, et du voisinage de la mer"
Each room can be understood like a cabin on a ship, a total living/sleeping environment, complete with moveable tables not unlike those for room-service. The inhabitant as passenger is released from the kitchen. Appropriately, at E.1027 the kitchen is isolated from the main body of the house, one must go outside (on deck) to access it.
Water is accessible from every room in the house, visually through the windows and physically through the many showers and sinks. It is recalled by the "divan en dalles"
Valery's dialogue also occurs beside a body of water. "The river is the river of Time"(Valery, 66). For Valery, "time itself surrounded you on all sides"(Valery, 94). For Eileen as well, it is not only the water which marks time's passing, but all of the elements. She conceived the house as a theater with seasonal stages. To the south was the blue, horizontal set of the sea, marked by the constant line of the horizon. To the north was the green, vertical set of the hillside into which the house was built. Curtains could be drawn on one or the other, responding to the weather. "When the sea is rough and the horizon gloomy, one has only to close the large bay window to the south, draw the curtain, and then open the small bay window to the north, which gives on to a garden of lemon trees and the old village, to find a new horizon where masses of greenery replace the broad expanses of blue and gray"(Gray, quoted in Adam, 205. note: At the Centre Culturel (1946) she experimented literally with the seasonal stage, shielding an indoor theatre from the elements with an open air theatre directly overhead. "On notera que des spectacles simultanés á l'extérieur et à l'interieur peuvent être envisagés"). It is, perhaps, a vertical horizon the house opens to the north, accentuated with the tall, narrow window in the bath area partitioned off in the westernmost part of the living room. The antithesis of Le Corbusier's ribbon window, this vertical band is one of the most prominent elements in the façade by which one first gains access to the house from land. The house appears at its outset to be constructed, like "L'Eclectisme au Doute" as inter-view, between views.
One could also understand the house as a camera. Gray took most of the photographs published in L'Architecture Vivante herself. She was very aware of the photographic process, the architecture of the camera. The ubiquitous shutters function like the shutter of a camera, adapting the mechanical eye to its context, to light. The house captures the touristic landscape within its lens; the southern awnings forcing a kind of zoom towards the horizon. But the inhabited camera opens its mechanical eyes in all directions. The earth and hillside are also mechanically reproduced on and within its surfaces, though through smaller apertures.
The earth. It shares with the sea the border of the horizon. It provides an alternative view and physical access to the house from the town higher up on the hill. In the winter the abstract striations of the terraced landscape are particularly clear, as is the house's siting on a different orientation from that of the landscape. The stepping of the house does not repeat that of the land; it is a variation. It cuts across the grain, like the railroad track just above it in the hillside. The plan superimposes as well the different contextual layers, like tiles. The promenade architectural starts at the entrance of the site, rhythmed by the terraces that guide us into the house and step past across it to the final terrace of the sea. The car has been left behind; the steep terrain is navigated by the pedestrian, entered slowly, as the stencil (entrez lentement) at the house's northernmost entrance remarks. The earth also travels into the house, metaphorically, on the walls -- earthy-brown curtains and vegetation-green panels punctuate the white surfaces. Always it is abstracted, transformed by the dialogue between in and out. Thus the movement of the context through the house is responded to by an extension of the interior across the land, via tiled squares of landscape, an outdoor sunroom, and carpet-clad balconies.
