Eileen Gray
Eileen Gray was an Irish designer in Paris who became known for lacquer and furniture and then designed the house E-1027 on the Mediterranean. She questioned a modernism that was merely technical and wanted to start from the human body and everyday life.
Eileen Gray was born in 1878 in Enniscorthy in Ireland into an aristocratic family. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, one of the first women there. In 1902 she moved to Paris, where she learned Japanese lacquer technique from the craftsman Seizo Sugawara. Her lacquer screens and furniture were in demand, and in 1922 she opened a shop, the Galerie Jean Désert, where she sold her furniture and rugs. She had no training as an architect but learned through the architect Jean Badovici and through her own studies.
Together with Badovici she designed E-1027 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, built in 1926–1929, one of the most admired houses of modernism. She designed furniture such as the Bibendum chair, the E-1027 table and screens of lacquer and tubing. She also built her own house, Tempe à Pailla in Castellar, in 1932–1934, and made designs for housing and a cultural centre that were never built. Le Corbusier exhibited one of her projects in his pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1937.
Gray withdrew and was almost forgotten, but in the 1970s she was rediscovered. She died in Paris in 1976, aged 98. Her furniture now sells for high prices, and in 2009 a chair by her sold for more than 20 million euros. She has become a symbol of the women long made invisible in architectural history, and E-1027 has been restored and opened to visitors.