Eileen gray wiki

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Gray’s story places her at the forefront of modernism and highlights the challenges from being a woman in a male-dominated field.

(Image credit: Creative Commons)

Who was Eileen Gray? This quality accounts for ideological consistencies between Gray's built work and her hypothetical designs.
Le Corbusier was a fervent admirer of Gray's architecture; he displayed her Vacation and Leisure Center alongside the work of his fellow Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) delegates in his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the Parisian International Exposition "Art et Technique" of 1937.

The house was built on a slight diagonal facing out to sea, offering striking long, blue views. One notable piece was the Bibendum Chair from 1926: its bulbous appearance, of stacked rounded forms upholstered in leather, was modelled on the ‘Michelin Man’, the cartoonish tire company mascot.
Despite having designed home interiors for herself and others in Paris, Gray had no formal architecture training.

She settled definitively in Paris in 1906 after training in Asian lacquer techniques with a London firm specializing in antique restoration. Rather than beginning her designs from a set of theoretical precepts declared in a manifesto—an approach adopted by her more polemical counterparts—Gray challenged the all-encompassing claims of such examples of contemporary theorizing by adapting a selective combination of modern movement tenets to address the occupants' physical, psychological, and spiritual needs.

Seen here, a rare archive image of a view of the main lounge area within the home, featuring her Pirogue daybed, her Bibendum Chair and Dragon armchair.

Eileen Gray directed her remarkable integration of architecture, furnishings, and textiles to address the modern individual's need for physical and psychological comfort, qualities that were frequently neglected in the early 20th-century quest for innovative forms.

Late in her life, Gray received a number of honors; she was named a Royal Designer for Industry by the British Royal Society of Arts (1972) and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (1973). L-shaped and flat-roofed, the minimalist concrete building is an ordered assemblage of rectilinear planes, massing that recalls the ocean liners that inspired creatives of the modern era.

Born in Brownswood, Ireland, Gray studied drawing and painting at the Slade School of Art in London, before moving to Paris in 1902. With its horizontal white lines, funnel-like stairwell opening onto the roof and token buoy hitched to the side, it's like a modernist ship ready to set sail.

Tempe à Pailla

(Image credit: Courtesy of Engel & Völkers)

Tempe à Pailla is nestled in the idyllic hinterland of the French Riviera – it is a home with a lot of creative history within its walls.

Because her architecture drew on the ideas of her avant-garde contemporaries, it was both admired by her peers and forgotten in historical accounts of the modern movement.

Born into a wealthy family in Enniscorthy, Ireland, Gray studied drawing at the Slade School in London and the École Colarossi and Académie Julian in Paris.

Nevertheless, she transitioned into the field in her late 40s.

Her designs mixed refinement with playfulness. As editor of the influential periodical L'architecture vivante (1923-33), Badovici was an enthusiastic agent for the modern movement. Gray exhibited the models of the house and its furnishings at both the 1929 Salon d'Automne and the Union des Artistes Modernes, the latter a dissident group of designers of which she was a founding member.

When she died in Paris in 1976, Gray was 98 years old and still producing furniture.

CAROLINE CONSTANT

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). This reliance on certain leaders of the architectural avant-garde was a necessary corollary to her creative work, however. With her own vacation house near Castellar (1934), Gray abandoned overt references to the work of her contemporaries while absorbing certain modernist design principles into her own values and expression.