1994
Throughout her life, Eileen Gray was engaged in many forms of dialogue. There were the dialogues she engaged with herself, her background, nationality and language. There was the published (textual) dialogue between Gray and Badovici in the 1929 issue of L'Architecture Vivante. This dialogue was written to introduce readers to the house that they had just constructed: E1027. We will see how the title of the house, like the architecture inhabiting it, is already an intertwined dialogue. It engages a dialogue between inside and out, with the context (sea, earth, sun, air), with time. These dialogic elements of the house are re-presented on the pages of photographs and drawings produced for the 1929 L'Architecture Vivante. Gray enters modernism's monologic manifestoes into a dialogue; her work is a response to, rather than an illustration of, Le Corbusier's five points, and the modernist interpretation of hygiene. Throughout these dialogues many others will interfere.
Throughout this text, we have engaged Eileen Gray's work in dialogue with the texts of Valery and Deleuze on dialogue. Our text thus attempts to mediate between interpretations of dialogue contemporary with both Gray and ourselves. "Dia-logue: di, two; logue from legein [to speak]; a written composition in which two or more characters are represented as conversing or reasoning on some topic." (Webster's Dictionary). Paul Valery uses the genre of dialogue in his text "Eupalinos, ou l'architecte." It was written for the only issue of the journal Architectures (September 1921) to be published. Valery notes the effects of this highly constrained site upon his work. "I was requested to limit its size quite precisely to 115,800 letters.... My dialogue was at first too long. I shortened it; and then it was a little too short -- I lengthened it. I came to find these exigencies very interesting, though it is possible that the text itself may have suffered a little in consequence"Paul Valéry, letter to Paul Souday (1923), published in Paul Valéry, Dialogues, trans. William McCausland Stewart (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956). An architecture was thus constructed around his dialogue on architecture. Or, his text was constructed out of the architecture of the journal.
Gray's architecture also is a dialogue with the architectural journal. It too folds within itself textual and architectural layers, letters stenciled on walls, adapted from the architectures of earlier publications, reprinted on pages framed by other words. Gilles Deleuze further probes the imperceptible architecture of dialogue. "Les questions se fabriquent comme autre chose...L'art de construire un problème, c'est trés important: on invente un problème, une position de problème avant de trouver une solution. Rien de tout cela ne se fait dans une interview, dans une conversation, dans une discussion....Le but ce n'est pas de répondre à des questions, c'est de sortir, c'est d'en sortir... Mais pendant ce temps là, pendant qu'on tourne en rond dans ces questions, il y a des devenirs qui opèrent en silence, qui sont presque imperceptibles."(Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977): 7-8).
