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Architecture history – Pride edition

I’m still not really mentally in a place to understand what mentorship looks like during a pandemic, during a civil movement calling for long-overdue racial and societal reform, and during Pride month. I know it’s important, I know I need to keep sharing, but I’m also trying to spend a lot of time listening and learning and pointing to people already doing the great work of education, reform, and policy work. But today, I wanted to share some architecture history I wrote up internally for my peers at RATIO as we celebrate Pride month in the world of architecture. Consider this Architecture history – the Pride edition.

Note: For other advice as you navigate your career, check out the #ArchiTalks series. A past post that might specifically be helpful is “The Everyady Citizen Architect”.

Hailing from Ireland, Eileen Gray was an architect, furniture designer, artist, pioneer of the Modern Movement…and a bisexual. Beginning her career in 1910, her career morphed based on her passions, with each interest adding to the other. Beginning in art and lacquering, Gray wove a career through furniture, architecture, and interior design – combining luxurious materials with geometric forms and minimal spaces.

Fun fact: Gray was the first woman in Paris to obtain a driver’s license and served as an ambulance driver during World War I.
The intersections of being a female in a male profession, and the lesser-known reality of her sexuality, impacted both her career prominence and respect during her life. Opening her own shop, Jean Désert, in Paris in 1922, Gray named the shop under a pseudonym – pairing a male name and her love of the North African Desert. Clients included James Joyce and Ezra Pound.
Her most famous work E-1027 was vandalized by on-again, off-again professional friend Le Corbusier, who mocked Gray’s bisexuality by painting murals on the walls of her and a female lover. As architecture critic Rowan Moore put, “As an act of naked phallocracy, Corbusier’s actions are hard to top…”, adding that Le Corbusier was “seemingly affronted that a woman could create such a fine work of modernism” so he “asserted his dominion, like a urinating dog, over the territory”.
 
Much of her notoriety, unfortunately, did not occur until shortly before and continuing after her death. In 1967, a historian wrote about then-89-year-old Gray, renewing public interest in the architect and designer. Until that time, E-1027 had been credited to Badovici (her then-boyfriend) and Le Corbusier himself. Gray died at the age of 98 in 1976. The E-1027 house, after being used as a target for shooting practice by the Germans in WWII, was stripped of all of Gray’s original furniture and secretly sold at auction by the physician of the previous owner just before her death in 1980. The house was not given protected status and restoration funds until 1999, with mixed results in the efforts by various organizations – a restoration that is still underway. One of her furniture designs, the “Dragons” armchair, set a record sale price for a piece of 20th century decorative art when it sold at auction for $28,300,000 in 2009. The E-1027 table is now an icon of Modern design, even if most designers don’t know about its designer.
There’s no happy way to finish this story for Eileen Gray. There are unknown stories behind the things we see all of the time, and throughout much of history those stories are even more hushed if the inventor, designer, or researcher is a minority in gender, race, sexual orientation, or any of the above combined. As designers, our work moving forward is to not only pay homage to these trailblazers, but also design spaces where the NEXT inventor, designer, researcher, or writer can be inspired to create and claim their work proudly.

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Tags: architect, business, design, diversity, equity, experience, inclusion, leadership, learning from, lessons, pride, read, share knowledge

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