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Beatriz Colomina: Battle lines: E. 1027 (October 12, 1994)01:14:02

Michael Rotondi introduces Beatriz Colomina, noting her most recent book Privacy and Publicity. Colomina begins by explaining the title “Battle Lines E1027.” She cites Martin Heidegger on the concept of horizon, and José Ortega y Gasset and Josep Lluis Sert the public being in the interior of the private. Colomina examines E1027, the house at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin designed by Eileen Gray as a vacation home for herself and Jean Badovici. After a discussion of Le Corbusier’s drawings of Algerian women, Colomina describes Corbusier’s obssesion with the E1027 house, the eight murals he painted inside it, the observatory he built near it, and his correspondence with Gray about it. Reviewing the postcards and pictures that inspired Le Corbusier’s Algerian women drawings, Colomina argues that there is a photographic sensibility in Corbusier’s murals at E1027. During the questions after the lecture Colomina points out the bullet holes in E1027, describing how the German army used it during the occupation of France.

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