Study 127: Eileen Gray E.1027: Le Corbusier’s Vandalism and the Trauma Provenance Deconstructed.

The house was never his. E.1027 (the white villa Eileen Gray built above the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin between 1926 and 1929) was the century's most complete argument that modernism could be intimate rather than doctrinaire. A decade later, Le Corbusier covered its calibrated white walls with unrequested murals, an act Gray named as vandalism and the critic Rowan Moore reads as an assertion of dominance. The murals are still there. For decades, so was a sign at the gate that said “Le Corbusier.”