The ideas presented in this site developed out of a series of dialogues focused on the work of Eileen Gray. Our understanding of her architecture developed together into an oral presentation using the form of a dialogue, modeled on the published dialogue of Gray and Badovici in the 1929 special issue of L'Architecture Vivante. Later we found it impossible to delaminate our ideas. Out of the many dialogues in which we had engaged, our voices were as connected as the initials of Gray and Badovici in the title of the published house, E1027. We engage a related dialogue with theirs, across the languages and borders of France and Ireland. The site emulates this cross-cultural dialogue, quotations excerpted from their French context into ours, American and now Irish. More and more dialogues produce additional layers: dialogues with other students in the class, and with our professor Beatriz Colomina; conversations on the phone with the architect of the monuments historique as well with the architect Cecile Briolle who participated in the renovation of Villa Noailles in Hyieres and is doing her thesis on the problematic of the renovation of the built work of the modern movement; the conversations with the otoctones that Ethel met when returning to Menton this winter ; with Eileen's niece Prunella Clough in London; the non-communication with Madame Ferrari, the owner of Eileen's second house in Castellar; and most of all the dialogues we had with the Côte d'Azur, the site, and the houses that Eileen built in Menton and Castellar when we visited these places. The photographs included throughout the site document the condition of the houses in 1994.

ethel buisson + beth mclendon