“E.1027” portrays the creation of a masterpiece and brings Eileen Gray’s struggle for creative freedom to light. The Irish designer Eileen Gray (1878–1976) built house E.1027, also calling it “my boat”, in the 1920s for herself and the Romanian architect Jean Badovici, her lover at the time. Across E.1027, with a spectacular view of the Principality of Monaco, stands Le Corbusier’s ‘Cabanon’, his minimalist holiday home at ‘Cap Moderne’. Corbusier, who stayed at E.1027 several times while visiting his friend Badovici, was fascinated by Gray’s architecture. He even painted several murals in the villa, which Gray called vandalism and demanded removal—a request Corbusier ignored. The two buildings continue to rival each other on the site, telling a story about the power of female creativity and the desire of men to control it.
