Sun Breakers. Threadsewn hardcover, English/German. Spector Books, 2023

Sun Breakers

 

Presenting one’s own resentment as reason, and those targeted by it as oversensitive or unreasonable is arguably one of the best tricks of male dominance. To this day, we can barely describe the E.1027 house without mention of how Le Corbusier – feeling threatened or excluded by its design – attempted to encroach on this architecture designed and built by Eileen Gray. The designer and architect had built a house on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, initially for herself and her partner Jean Badovici. Le Corbusier, for reasons that are slowly finding their way into architectural theory and providing grounds for revision, (recently expounded by Beatriz Colomina in Interstices), built a cabin on the neighbouring property overlooking the property of Gray and her partner. He then proceeded to immortalise himself in various murals – “free of charge” as he notes in his memoirs. Uninvited and against the architect’s wishes, he framed his transgression as a gift. Gray’s objections went unheeded, so that the intervening 100 years of architectural historiography have told his version, and not only have his interventions been vindicated, but his fame and his painting overshadow her design to this day.

 

The book, Sun Breakers, a photographic portrait of the building by Jürgen Beck, does without them, without Corbusier, without a cabin and without sexist and homophobic portrayals of women and families. Beck’s photographs engage in a dialogue with the architectural space. Through the titular Sun Breakers, a shutter-like screen from the Mediterranean sun, photographic and architectural locations lose their objective frames, and the space opens into an expression for other forms of living and working, a malleable structure for flexible days and relationships. He reveals a design that addresses psychological and emotional needs, that inscribes things with their own names and relationships long before auto-fiction and the affective turn.

 

Beck moves inquisitively around the E. 1027 house, which has only recently been elevated to an architectural icon. He takes summer strolls beside and into it, and avoids clear horizon lines or overviews that would enlarge what was planned as an intimate space for work, leisure and sport. Accompanying the pictures is an essay by Swiss author Dorothee Elmiger, who expands Beck’s view of Gray with clearsighted fragments and thoughts that shift between impression and analysis. Her text is particularly concerned with planning as a way of imagining the future, which is the essence of Gray’s work. The book’s design by graphic designer Ina Kwon gives the whole thing a mix between magazine cover and hardcover linen binding, reflecting Jürgen Beck’s approach to the project: to encapsulate the design, characterised by its openness and lightness and what comes alive within it, in a story poised between glamour and critique.

 

Available through Spector Books.