Eileen Gray: E.1027, 1926-1929

On the rocky coast of the C te d'Azur perches a crisp, white modern home, elongated and compact, cryptically called E.1027. The Anglo-Irish designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976) bought the site, paid for the construction and designed the building (with the assistance of her close friend, Jean Badovici, to whom Gray gave the site, building and contents).

It was Gray's first foray into architecture, and as such it was a manifesto. For Gray, the whole building--the structure, its materials, the color scheme, the windows, the hardware, the fittings, the furniture--was an experiment with new concepts of spatial relations, an attempt to create an architecture of lightness and freedom. This new publication finally places this key example of modern architecture in its rightful position in history, contextualizing the structure with essays, reproductions of archival material, photographs and numerous scale drawings.