Le Corbusier Vandalized This House. An Artist Is Reclaiming Its Memory

Canadian sculptor and photographer Lorna Bauer wants to help correct the record on E-1027, the century-old modernist villa that Irish designer Eileen Gray built on the French Riviera with dashes of input from her lover, Romanian architect and critic Jean Badovici. “Maison en Bord de Mer,” Bauer’s show at New York-based Trotter&Sholer gallery, conjures the spirit of the architectural icon, while playing with memory’s machinations.

Indeed, E-1027 offers a multifaceted case study in memory. The home’s lore precedes it. Badovici’s friend, architect Le Corbusier, painted murals inside a decade after it was built. In 1952, Gray called it vandalism. Bauer aligns with critic Rowan Moore‘s take that Le Corbusier was asserting dominance. Whereas E-1027 is clean, “the murals feel bright and bold and brash,” Bauer said on a video call. They’re still there.

Le Corbusier tried and failed to buy E-1027 from Badovici. Instead, he constructed cabins next door in 1952, before he died swimming there in 1965. Badovici, meanwhile, died in 1956. E-1027 fell into a limbo. This side of the century, though, it has undergone renovations under the care of the French government. Gray has received a 2024 documentary. Today, Gray is so regularly rediscovered in terms of E-1027 that writers have implored society time and again to re-focus on her.

Best known for her use of glass sculpture and photography, Bauer has structured bodies of work around art-historical anecdotes like E-1027 since doing a Parisian residence with the Québécois government in 2013, exploring Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris. “I realized I love delving into making work, but having some sort of structure around it,” Bauer said.

The works throughout “Maison en Bord de Mer” have been brewing since Bauer’s sole visit to E-1027, in 2017, while in Athens for a show. Bauer spent an afternoon photographing E-1027. “There was a big sign that said ‘Le Corbusier,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘didn’t Eilleen Gray build this?’” Bauer realized the situation. “I was kind of offended,” she recalled.

In 2021, Bauer made 24 works based on a mirror she saw at E-1027. The home’s intimate, intuitive design—and the triumph of Gray’s legacy—inspired her. “I wanted to do a larger project,” Bauer said. “I kept it on the back burner until I felt ready to tackle it in a more intense, meaningful way.”

Literal references appear—like the wire vines of glass citrus in (all works 2026), or the phonograph Bauer blew glass into for , which honors E-1027’s feature of the same name. Two sunny windows nearby generally evoke a sense of home. Nestled into one pane is a floral photo.

Bauer’s latest show advances photography’s obvious parallels with memory. Most of the shots punctuating Bauer’s wall-hanging kiln-formed glass sculptures hail from her E-1027 trip. , for instance, pairs a photo of fronds with embossed ropes—both nods to E-1027. Another floral photo appears in , imprinted with bricks also more loosely evoking homes. In actuality, Bauer cast the kiln’s foundation.

Alas, memory is more like photography—fallible. Many sculptures here feature Bauer’s newfound practice of hand-mirroring, which arose from her work with the peel-apart Polaroid 55 film that photographer Ansel Adams helped develop.

“A lot of the time, because the film is 20 years old or more, it doesn’t work, or you’ll get streaks” Bauer said. “I realized that the main chemical, silver nitrate, is also what is used to mirror glass.”

, for instance, is activated by a viewer’s shifting silhouette. The frames surrounding small photographs like , on the other hand, flash distorted reflections. Though these works are haunting and elegant, the view ultimately depends where you’re standing.