The house as promise of protection and freedom

The Villa E-1027 is born from a great love story between Eileen Gray (1878-1976), the aristocratic designer of Irish origin, and Jean Badovici (1893-1956), the Rumanian architect. This is how the Authors decided to name their house on the Cote d’Azur, when they planned it and built it between 1926 and 1929. It was built on an arduous strip of land between the sea and the railway. The chosen name, a kind of alphanumeric code, was coined by Eileen Gray as a seal of their relationship. Indeed E stands for Eileen, 10 for the letter J of Jean, 2 is the B in Badovici and 7 is the first letter of her surname. In the maison au bord de mer one can effortlessly pick all the “Lecorbuserian” principals of modern architecture (the free plan, the pilotis, the ribbon windows, the roof garden). Even though Le Corbusier had already codified his “pillars of modern architecture” in 1923, he will only implement them some years later in the Villa Savoye. The Villa will become a manifesto of rationalist architecture. But where Le Corbusier imagines the house as a machine à habiter, Eileen Gray imagines sensual spaces where life can flow freely. However, the idea of protection and freedom of the project cannot be translated into the simplistic formula of comfort and safety, as the Villa E-1027 rather aims intrinsically for a representation of the idea of an unconditional state of intimacy. Emanuele Coccia, interpreting it from a philosophical point of view, says that the House is “the moral reality by excellence: a psychic and material artefact that allows us to exist better than nature would do. But most of all, he adds, “Before being an object, the house is an emotion, it is hope and a project of life”.