To dwell means to leave traces: Modernism, mastery, and meaning in the house museums of Gaudí and Le Corbusier

Author: Georgina Downey Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 34 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge) Raw file: raw/chapters/downey-2018-to-dwell-means-to-leave-traces.md

Summary

Downey reads two architect's house museums — Casa Gaudí at Park Güell, Barcelona (1906–25, grand) and Le Corbusier's Cabanon at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (1952, 3.66 m², modest) — to ask how conserved domestic interiors function in relation to the architect's public persona, and what role traces of habitation play in shifting perceptions and generating new discourses on their work and lives. Drawing on Postiglione's The Architect's Home (the house museum as work and biographical testimony), Nora's lieux de mémoire, Keeble's period-room optics and Aynsley's "use, life, and afterlife," she argues the house museum is a "double modernist text" whose meanings are remade by present-day curators, visitors and scholarship — most visibly in the postfeminist, poststructural rereadings (Colomina on E.1027; the Gaudí homosocial hint) that have demoted the "masters" of modernism from god-like status and recentered their companions, intimates, and collaborators.

Key Claims

The modern canon of architect's house museums — Aalto, Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Horta, Le Corbusier, Mackintosh, Morris, Mollino, Taut, Seidler, Soane, Utzon, van de Velde, Voysey, Wagner — has "helped cement the legacy of the architect in question" and served architecture and design students as "'hands-on' sites of learning," a practice with an eighteenth-century pedagogical pedigree in Blondel's conferences sur les lieux at the École des Beaux-Arts (n. 1).
Postiglione's thesis: architect's house museums "always engage two lines of interest: they are works, and they afford biographical testimony to their creators" and represent "a more sturdy relation between occupant and dwelling … which allows us to determine the real, actual intention prevailing in the organization of the daily living space and the private work space"; such houses must be preserved as "poetic manifestos" to the architect's creative spirit (pp. 9, 11).
The house museum conveys narratives "told in the round, through all the senses," which is why it is a site of pilgrimage "where visitors attempt to re-experience past senses of interiority and spatiality"; in Anna Jug's formulation, "the building itself is part of the collection."
The chapter's operative concept of trace is Elizabeth Grosz's Derridean signature: "The signature cannot authenticate, it cannot prove, it cannot make present the personage of the author; but it is a remnant, a remainder of and a testimony to both a living past and a set of irreducible and ineliminable corporeal traces" (p. 22) — always a "double bind between the interior and exterior of the text."
Famous-person house museums are Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire; their power rests on the modern conception (Benjamin's) that "the domestic interior is both an extension and a representation of the modern individual" — so the musealized home is "a kind of double modernist text."
Keeble: the period room represents "the layering of one age through the optic of another"; history "is made and remade according to the needs of the present," and the premise "this is how things really were" "periodizes experience into incommensurable slices of history" — the house museum cannot avoid modernity's "utopian and/or dystopian polemics."
Aynsley: modern house-museum visitors know the period room is a manipulable text with a "use, life, and afterlife"; the value of these "intrinsically modern" texts "may lie, not in what the spaces themselves reveal as 'authentic' documents, but rather in what they reflect about the attitudes, values, and ideologies of those presenting them" — visitors and curators alike.
Casa Museu Gaudí history: built 1905 as a display home on Eusebi Güell's Park Güell estate; designed by Francesc Berenguer (Gaudí's "right hand man," then not technically qualified) with plans signed by Gaudí; occupied by Gaudí 1906–1925 (with his father and niece, then Carmelite nuns); sold December 1926 to the enthusiast Chiappos, who named it "Casa Gaudí"; bought by the Friends of Gaudí Association in 1960, opened as a museum 1963; acquired 1992 by the Construction Board of La Sagrada Familia Foundation, "which since then has used the profits from the house museum to fund ongoing construction of the basilica — still unfinished despite having commenced in 1882."
Casa Gaudí is "presented primarily as an exhibition space for furniture" — mostly pieces designed for Casa Batlló and Casa Calvert, displayed in domestic context (with a video of a dancer demonstrating postural variations for Casa Batlló's Double Bench, 1907) — while only the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen suggest private life; the bedroom preserves "some trace of the architect's daily life" through "the stack of prayer books, the narrow single bed, the crucifix, and the prie dieu with a wicker base," staging "the astonishing contrast between the quite otherworldly munificence of La Sagrada Familia and the monastic – even ascetic – interior decor of the man who designed it and who commuted daily between these two extraordinarily contrasting interiors."
A Casa Gaudí wall text notes that the sculptor Llorenç Matamala i Piñol "often slept in the house" — a trace "the twenty-first-century reader of this text could not possibly avoid" reading as a cherished, possibly romantic relation, "a radical new reading of Gaudi's life" that would run through his observable homosocial orientation ("a close circle of male friends," leadership of "large teams of male construction workers") against the received celibate conclusion.
The Cabanon: 3.66 m², entirely wood, faced in split pine logs, "Robinson Crusoe-ish" outside, its interior "a tender poem to the rationality of early modernism"; its prefabricated built-in units are Modulor-based "interior shell" components fabricated by Charles Barberis and Jean Prouvé in Ajaccio, Corsica, and delivered by boat in mid-1952; it shares a wall with the bistro L'Étoile de Mer through a 70-centimetre doorway, stands "a stone's throw above" Eileen Gray's E.1027, was acquired by the Conservatoire du Littoral in 1979, and was designated a French historical monument in 1996.
The Cabanon's interpretation has been transformed by scholarship: Le Corbusier is presented as a major architect and movement leader "but not, in fact, as 'god-like'" — the layering and lenses of contemporary readings "have dramatically altered the kind of stories that are currently told."
The gendered trace: the tour's anecdote that Yvonne's pillow lay "approximately twelve inches from the curtained off toilet area" while her husband's bed sat "under an airy window" is named "an effect of postfeminist inquiry within architectural history and theory, itself shaped since the 1980s by poststructural theory" — "Stories about 'masters' of modernism are no longer complete without reference to their companions, intimates, lovers, and supporters, so the idea of the interior as constructed discourse highly shaped by gender has spread."
Colomina's "Battle Lines: E.1027" (1996) took "a feminist and Freudian reading to the violent dramas" of the four closely sited buildings; Le Corbusier's 1938–39 eight murals on Gray's E.1027 — "an act of vandalism" in Gray's words — are read as "an 'effacement' of Gray's sexuality and genius" driven by "Le Corbusier's psychosexual complexes"; Colomina's decade-long obsession "has cleared up many misconceptions around Gray's authorship of E.1027" (once attributed to Jean Badovici, in some sources to Le Corbusier himself), "influenced a generation of architectural history scholars," and created "a thirst among the general public for Gray's work."
The proof of the shifting lens: a 2014 straw poll found about a third of Cabanon-area visitors were Irish nationals come for E.1027, and "some thirty percent of the group had come to explore Gray's work instead of Le Corbusier's" — "many tourists come not to see the Cabanon, but to see E.1027."
Both museums deploy "a deliberate curatorial tactic to leave interpretations fairly open"; visitors are "encouraged to think and experience the spaces as authentic, while what is and is not original is signposted" — and the readings thereby opened permit "a new Gaudi… one that may not have been possible even twenty years earlier."

Connections

Concepts: house-museum — the architect's house museum as the subcategory this chapter theorizes; interior-as-biography — Postiglione's biographical testimony; trace — the Grosz/Derridean trace applied to domestic interiors; dwelling — Benjamin's "to dwell means to leave traces"; memory and site-of-memory — Nora's lieux de mémoire; period-room — Keeble's layered optic and Aynsley's "use, life, and afterlife"; self-fashioning — the house museum cementing the architect's legacy; domestic-interior — the interior as "extension and representation of the modern individual"; house-body-equation — that extension-and-representation generalized to the modern individual; gender-and-the-interior — the postfeminist/poststructural reshaping of the masters' stories; homosocial-space — Gaudí's male circle and the Matamala reading; prefab-interior — the Cabanon's Modulor-dimensioned "interior shell" by Barberis and Prouvé; modernism — "masters" of modernism reread; interiority — the house museum as the site where visitors "attempt to re-experience past senses of interiority and spatiality"; patrimonial-interior — the museum afterlife when transmission fails; multisensory-museum — stories "told in the round, through all the senses."

Authors: Gregory Marinic (editor of the Reader); Le Corbusier (subject: the Cabanon, the Modulor, E.1027); Beatriz Colomina (whose "Battle Lines: E.1027" drives the Cabanon's new discourse); Walter Benjamin (the title's trace-dwelling dictum; the interior as the modern individual's extension); Georgina Downey (author).

Debates: None framed directly; the chapter bears on postmodernism-vs-modernism obliquely (the "double modernist text," the demotion of the masters) and on the wiki's interior-design-vs-architecture cluster through the architect's domestic interior as a site of interior-architectural meaning.

Related source notes: Spankie 2018 (the Freud house-museum case: re-creation, the rope-off desk); Colomina 1993 (the E.1027 vandalism, here carried to its 1996 "Battle Lines" version and its reception); Stokes-Rees 2018 (the museum as narrative space); Croft 2006 (the musealized modernist house as "control, not freedom"); Schneiderman 2018 (prefabricated interiors); Massey 2018 (the interior's befores and afters); Brownell 2018 (the Modulor-era Unité d'habitation in the Le Corbusier reversal).

Direct Quotes

"as sites, [architect's house museums] always engage two lines of interest: they are works, and they afford biographical testimony to their creators" (Postiglione, p. 9, quoted)

"a more sturdy relation between occupant and dwelling … which allows us to determine the real, actual intention prevailing in the organization of the daily living space and the private work space" (Postiglione, p. 9, quoted)

"we need to preserve the many – and in some cases deteriorating – modernist architects' houses because they stand as 'poetic manifestos' to the creative spirit of the architect" (Postiglione, p. 11, quoted)

"By their very nature, house museums give visitors the ability to stand inside of history. The objects in their collections are not housed in a building designed for that purpose, but rather, the building itself is part of the collection." (Jug, quoted)

"House museums can also convey narratives about the occupant(s) that can be told in no other way; they can convey stories told in the round, through all the senses, which is why house museums are sites of pilgrimage where visitors attempt to re-experience past senses of interiority and spatiality."

"The signature cannot authenticate, it cannot prove, it cannot make present the personage of the author; but it is a remnant, a remainder of and a testimony to both a living past and a set of irreducible and ineliminable corporeal traces." (Grosz, p. 22, quoted)

"the layering of one age through the optic of another" (Keeble, quoted)

"this is how things really were" (Keeble, on the period room's premise, quoted)

"[the period room as a text with a] use, life, and afterlife" (Aynsley, quoted)

"It is in the bedroom in particular where some trace of the architect's daily life is preserved."

"Here, the contemporary viewer cannot help but wonder at the astonishing contrast between the quite otherworldly munificence of La Sagrada Familia and the monastic – even ascetic – interior decor of the man who designed it and who commuted daily between these two extraordinarily contrasting interiors."

"often 'slept in the house'" (Casa Gaudí wall text on Llorenç Matamala i Piñol, quoted)

"the twenty-first-century reader of this text could not possibly avoid the allusion to a cherished, if not a romantic, relationship. If this were so, it would constitute a radical new reading of Gaudi's life."

"'Robinson Crusoe-ish' on the exterior, the interior is a tender poem to the rationality of early modernism"

"Le Corbusier is identified as one of the major architects of the twentieth century and as a leader in terms of the modern movement, but not, in fact, as 'god-like.'"

"Stories about 'masters' of modernism are no longer complete without reference to their companions, intimates, lovers, and supporters, so the idea of the interior as constructed discourse highly shaped by gender has spread."

"In the summer of 1938–39, he defaced the pristine exterior walls of his neighbor (Irish architect and designer) Eileen Gray's E.1027 by painting eight large 'murals' in what she called 'an act of vandalism.'"

"Colomina has shown that the murals were an 'effacement' of Gray's sexuality and genius, and were the consequence of Le Corbusier's psychosexual complexes." (Colomina, p. 96, quoted)

"Many tourists come not to see the Cabanon, but to see E.1027."

"the fact that some thirty percent of the group had come to explore Gray's work instead of Le Corbusier's suggests a 'shifting lens' of which stories are told, why, and how."

"there is a deliberate curatorial tactic to leave interpretations fairly open; visitors are encouraged to think and experience the spaces as authentic, while what is and is not original is signposted."

"for as Walter Benjamin reminds us, 'to dwell means to leave traces.'" (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 9, quoted)

Open Questions

Is the Matamala wall-text reading (the "slept in the house" hint) evidence or curatorial suggestiveness? What protocol governs reading intimacy from museal didactics — and does Downey's own reading replicate the presentist optic she describes (Keeble's layering)?
The chapter's museum canon is entirely male except by negation (Gray's E.1027 outdrawing the Cabanon). What does the architect's house museum do for women architects' legacy-formation — and is E.1027 (a house museum by reception, if not by intent) the genre's first feminist reversal?
If the value of the house museum "may lie, not in what the spaces themselves reveal as 'authentic' documents, but rather in what they reflect about the attitudes, values, and ideologies of those presenting them" (Aynsley), is conservation itself a presentist act — and can "leaving interpretations fairly open" be a stable curatorial policy or only a momentary one?
The Cabanon is open to visitors only twice a year and the bistro property is still privately owned and vacationed on by the descendants of the connecting family. What does restricted access do to the house museum as public text — and does scarcity produce pilgrimage?
Casa Gaudí's profits fund the still-unfinished Sagrada Familia: is the architect's house museum structurally an economic engine for the architect's unfinished œuvre — a patrimony generated after death (cf. patrimonial-interior)?
Downey ends by invoking Benjamin's "to dwell means to leave traces." Does the musealized interior preserve traces or manufacture them — and is the "trace that is signed as authentic or not" (Downey) a genuine Derridean remainder or a signature effect the museum sells?