Superb modern chair by Eileen Gray, featured in a Guardian list this this week. It’s the Transat Chair (1925-30). “The Transat chair is from the late 1920s, when Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand were forging in tubular steel assertive icons of the machine age. Transat, with its spare timber frame and graceful curve of fabric, had more subtle ambitions. Gray, as her collaborator Jean Badovici said, was concerned …read more

See a previous post for more information on this famous modernist house by Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray. There has been a lot of concern about the house’s survival, but as these recent photos by my Danish internet friend Vibeke Jakobsen show, it’s safely undergoing restoration. The house looks so much better – compare these to the photos in the previous post. The house is a major historical site and an …read more

Ada Lovelace Day is an international blogging event instituted to draw attention to women who excel in the area of technology. Who is Ada Lovelace? From here: Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact …read more

On occasion, the women of 20th C design do get a certain amount of recognition. This rare aluminum pendant lamp by Eileen Gray, previously owned by Yves St Laurent, is up for auction at Christie’s and is estimated at US$1 million. Via dailyicon. I’ve written about Gray before, here and here.

  In the late 1920s, the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray designed and built a landmark piece of modernist architecture in the form of a seaside house. The Irish-born Gray is best known for her furniture design (her Bibendum chair is visible in the third photo above), but this is odd considering her architectural contributions. On a hill overlooking the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, Gray’s E-1027 house was built to share with …read more

Eileen Gray (1878-1976) produced some iconic pieces of early modernist design in a profession and an era hardly designed for women. Raised in Ireland, she trained in London and Paris and worked most of her life in France. She was a close friend of Corbusier’s and it seems clear that the design influences ran both ways, yet her Tubelight and her E-1027 table are still much more well-known than she is. …read more