Ordinarily these days, you’d just use Google Maps. But I went to the trouble of attending a Dublin cinema on Tuesday night to see a film called E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea, motivated in part by hopes of finding out where the house in question was, exactly.
Not that I planned to reach the south of France via the IFI in Temple Bar – I didn’t need the man in the old story to tell me he wouldn’t start from there if he were me.
It’s just that on a trip to the Cote d’Azur last summer, I must have been within 200m of Gray’s famous seafront villa and, despite repeated attempts, couldn’t find it.
From the traffic-crazed corniche on the steep hill above, my iPhone suggested, there was a walkway leading down to the house. Visible reality argued otherwise. Road signage was elliptical and confusing, meanwhile.
Film director Neil Jordan and the Éamon de Valera connection
Secluded residence – Frank McNally on the challenge of understanding (or even finding) Eileen Gray’s famous French villa
Hachikō the wonder dog - Frank McNally on the devoted pet’s nine-year vigil for his late master
Áine Ryan on losing things, from cash and a car, to a child mislaid on a hillside ramble
Although there were indications of a side road to or near E.1027, finding that proved elusive too.
After several U-turns on a route infested by fast-moving cars and motorbikes (as well as some slow-moving, confused tourists), I decided my French driver friend’s patience had been taxed enough. We abandoned the attempt to find Gray’s alleged* masterpiece until another day.
Oh well. That had only been an afterthought, anyway, when I realised the house was on our general route. The main goal of the afternoon had been to find the place, also at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where WB Yeats spent his last days, and then the hilltop cemetery where his remains resided for a decade (and may still reside, despite their official repatriation to Sligo in 1948).
That last quest was not completely successful either. When we asked a man in the cemetery office where the former Yeats grave was, he seemed never to have heard of the poet.
But then we found a gravestone of sorts, except it was mounted on a cemetery wall rather than a grave, indicating proximity to the original burial place, or the communal ossuary to which the remains were consigned in 1946.
Oh well, again. We got nearer to that than to E.1027 at least. There was also the bonus of a dramatic view from Yeatsian eternity out to sea, and down the coast to Monte Carlo.
Getting back to the supposed greatness of the Gray house, I’d be more than happy to be persuaded. And not having seen the thing in person, I thought a reverential 90-minute movie on the subject might clinch the argument. Alas, no doubt because I’m an architectural philistine, it didn’t.
Or maybe, perish the thought, the film was at fault. In support of this suspicion, I see that, when reviewing a previous Eileen Gray biopic in 2015, our critic Donald Clarke found it “dramatically inert”. That must be catching because the latest film is devoid of drama altogether. It’s like a still life with architects.
We are told again and again how revolutionary E.1027 was, how it rejected Le Corbusier’s notion that a house was a “machine” in favour of Gray’s idea that it was a living “body”. But we’re not shown why this is so. Or if we are, some of us were too thick to see it.
As presented in the film, the interiors looked to me as cold and clinical as the house’s name (a formula based on the initials of Gray and her collaborator). I suppose, as they say, you had to be there. And I haven’t been there yet, only very close.
A subtheme of the film is whether in adding his multicolour frescoes to Gray’s white walls without permission, Le Corbusier improved or vandalised the house. Gray thought it was the latter, and I tend to agree.
But if not always so maliciously, it is often the fate of architects to have their ideals compromised by others, and Le Corbusier hasn’t escaped either.
On a visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg some years ago, even then a martyr to French architectural side trips, I made the pilgrimage to Ronchamp to see his famous concrete church.
First this required a two-hour train journey south to Belfort, then a shorter train trip west. Then I had to catch a third, local train back part of the way I’d come. From there I still need to walk a mile or two up into the forested hills, berating myself for not bringing an umbrella because the skies were ominous.
But it was worth the trek to see the extraordinary creation by which Le Corbusier made a concrete edifice look like a giant mushroom that had sprouted from the hillside.
Nobody has since sought to improve his white walls with frescoes (although he had added a few colourful doodles himself). And in the decade he lived afterwards, fearing another Lourdes, he jealously guarded the site from further development.
Then on its 50th anniversary, plans were announced for the inevitable visitor centre, and a less inevitable convent, on the approaches to the church. The architect Renzo Piano (of Pompidou Centre fame) came up with something minimally intrusive in the end. Even so, outraged critics accused him of “murder before the cathedral”.
