Eileen Gray’s Architecture of Relationship: Materiality and Spatial Layering

Abstract

This paper aims to offer a reading of Eileen Gray’s work on the basis of a parallel that can be drawn between her critical interpretation of modern architecture and Japanese culture, about which she learnt through the intermediation of her fascination for and technical expertise in lacquer work, a technique that embodies a different way of understanding time, space and materiality. The western concepts related to the use of lineal perspective as both a method of representation and a spatial approach are replaced, in Japanese culture, by spatial layering. More specifically, there are three important key notions that may be used to trace a genealogy of Gray’s concept of space, based on a sincere relationship with materials, on the subtle control of boundaries and on a spatial syntactic structure in which onion-like enveloping skins wrap and create a sensory responsive and multi-layered environment. They are Ma which means pause; Rikyu nezumi which refers to the ambivalence of shadows, and Oku or the profoundness of a multi-layered sense of space. Screens are space dividers; furniture dissolves the compactness of a room into an adaptable space-time continuum; sliding and folding elements are mobile partitions that, like a Japanese fusuma, suggest rather than delimit spaces.