E.1027 on Apr 26, 2025 | UCSB Arts & Lectures

She built a house for herself. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a masterpiece.

Celebrated Irish designer Eileen Gray built a refuge – an avant-garde masterpiece – on the Côte d'Azur in 1929. She named it E.1027, a cryptic marriage of her initials and those of Jean Badovici, with whom she built it. Upon discovering the house, architect and painter Le Corbusier became fascinated and obsessed by it. He later covered the walls with murals and published photos of them. Gray described the paintings as vandalism and demanded restitution. Ignoring her wishes, he instead built his famous Le Cabanon directly behind E.1027, which dominates the narrative of the site to this day. A cinematic journey into the mind of Eileen Gray, E.1027 is a story about the power of one woman's creative expression and a man's desire to control it. (Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub, 2024, 89 min.)