War on Architecture: E.1027

Author: Beatriz Colomina Year: 1993 (Assemblage 20, "Violence, Space") Source type: article Raw file: raw/articles/colomina-1993-war-on-architecture-e1027.md

Note on source quality: This is a heavily corrupted machine transcription (repetitions, garbled names, truncated passages). The following summary extracts only the reliable, repeatedly stated core themes; details and quotations should be verified against the original before direct citation.

Summary

Colomina reads Le Corbusier's unauthorized painting of eight murals in Eileen Gray's house E.1027 (Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, 1926–29) as an act of violence against the house and its maker — a "raid" or vandalism that Gray experienced as a defacement and effacement. She draws connections between Le Corbusier's Algerian drawings/postcards, his colonial and gendered gaze, and the eventual history of the house (German wartime bullets, and the site of Le Corbusier's own death by drowning).

Key Claims

Unauthorized murals as violence: Le Corbusier painted murals in E.1027 "without the permission of Eileen Gray," who considered it "a vandalism," a "raid"; "a fellow architect, a man she admired, had without her consent defaced her design."
The mural as weapon: Le Corbusier "had repeatedly stated that the role of the mural … The mural for Le Corbusier is a weapon against architecture, a bomb."
Colonial/gendered gaze: Colomina links the Cap-Martin murals to his Algerian studies — sketches and postcards of Algerian women — reading the "Femmes d'Alger" imagery and the murals as a fetishistic appropriation of women / the other, organized through the "endless drawing and redrawing" and the careful "occupation" of a domestic space.
Colonization as gift: "Like all colonists, Le Corbusier does not think of it as an invasion but as a gift"; Gray was outraged that he recorded the murals as a favour ("No charge for the discharge"), "while imitating colonization. Such gifts cannot be returned."
House as contested space: the site of E.1027 and its history — occupation, bullet holes, later death — is read as a scene of violence over architecture, authorship, and space.

Connections

Concepts: Authorship · Critical Architecture · Everyday Life Authors: Beatriz Colomina Debates: Genius vs. Bureaucracy Related source notes: (related: representation and authorship cluster)

Direct Quotes

"[I]t was a raid. A fellow architect, a man she admired, had without her consent defaced her design." (quoting on Gray's view)

"The mural for Le Corbusier is a weapon against architecture, a bomb." (paraphrase/quote of Le Corbusier)

"Like all colonists, Le Corbusier does not think of it as an invasion but as a gift … Such gifts can not be returned."

Open Questions

What does Gray's E.1027 — and its defacement — reveal about authorial control, gender, and the myth of the modern (male) master?
How does Colomina's reading reframe the "genius" of the modern master against the everyday authorship Colomina elsewhere traces?