Battlelines: E. 1027
Beatriz Colomina
© Courtesy of the Eileen Gray Archive. National Museum of Ireland
“This lecture is the story of Le Corbusier’s relentless obsession with E.1027, a house by Eileen Gray, which turned the house into a battlefield in a tense power struggle that would only end with his death at sea, in front of that very house. It is also the story of my own obsession with this story, with this obsession. An obsession with an obsession then, that in my case, goes back three decades. Some people thought that I was exaggerating in my earlier reading of this story. I don’t mind exaggerating. Sometimes you need to exaggerate to make a point. But I went back to the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris and dug a little bit deeper into the archives. What I discovered demonstrates that rather than exaggerating. I hadn’t gone far enough. In the meantime, for those unfamiliar with the story I will start from the beginning.” - Beatriz Colomina
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Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture, the founding director of the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University, and the Director of Graduate Studies (Ph.D. program) in the School of Architecture. Her books include X-Ray Architecture (Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), Domesticity at War (The MIT Press, 2007), and Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Media (The MIT Press, 1996). She has curated a series of international exhibitions, based on archival and oral history research, as interfaces to communicate research to a wider audience with physical installations, digital platforms and new forms of publication. These exhibitions include: Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006-2013), Playboy Architecture (2012-2016) and Radical Pedagogies (2014-2016). In 2016 she was chief curator with Mark Wigley of the third Istanbul Design Biennial on the theme Are We Human? The Design of the Species. Her latest exhibition Sick Architecture opened at CIVA in Brussels in 2022.
