E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea

“J’ai toujours aimé l’architecture. Plus que tout” reflected Eileen Gray in 1973, ‘I’ve always loved architecture. More than anything”, continuing, ‘but I didn’t think I was capable of it’.¹

A capability her first major project, the villa E.1027 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on France’s Côte d’Azur, tended and tends to underscore she needn’t have doubted. If a capability that over the decades has oft been as concealed and inaccessible as E.1027.

With the film E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea writers and directors Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub explore not just the biography of E.1027, but architecture as more than just construction, and also relationships with and within architecture, and in doing so allow not only for differentiated reflections on the (hi)story of architecture, but also enable one to better locate Eileen Gray, and her House by the Sea, in that (hi)story, and thus to better locate Eileen Gray not only as the architect she doubted she could be, but as a more instructive and informative architect than she is often appreciated as…….