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?