In 1906 she settled for good in Paris, where she earned her initial reputation as a designer of lavish furniture and interiors in which she adapted traditional Asian lacquer techniques to modern European taste. Gray's 1922 encounter with Jean Badovici (1893-1956), a Romanian who had come to Paris to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was decisive for her career. As editor of the influential periodical L'Architecture Vivante (1923-33), Badovici was an enthusiastic agent for the modern movement. He encouraged Gray to take up architecture, introduced her to the work of the major European designers, and collaborated with her on several buildings. The early issues of L'Architecture Vivante were Gray's textbooks, providing fertile territory for her architectural speculations. In 1926 Gray began a six-year collaboration with Badovici in which they renovated several houses in Vézelay and completed what has become her best-known work, the villa that she designed both for and with Badovici in Roquebrune-Cap Martin (1926-29). She named the house E.1027 * a cipher for the author's intertwined initials (E.J.B.G) * indicating the collaborative nature of the undertaking. On an exhibition panel on E.1027 Gray articulated her objectives: "House envisaged from a social point of view: minimum of space, maximum of comfort." Toward this end she initiated certain spatial principles that she used throughout her career: orienting the main living space to the southern exposure and view and bedrooms to the rising sun; segregating private areas from the more public zones of the house; isolating service spaces. The spatial hierarchy reflects Badovici's penchant for entertaining: an open living/dining room capable of accommodating extra guests and a separate zone for sleeping, dressing and work on the main level; an independent kitchen adjoining an outdoor cooking space near the main entrance; a guest room and minimal servant's quarters on the lower level. She insured the occupants' freedom by providing each sleeping area with independent access to the garden. Gray integrated furniture and architecture to facilitate multiple uses in each space. She conceived of the living room opening onto a narrow balcony as a loggia, equipped with screen-like vertical windows capable of opening fully to admit sunlight and view. A partition incorporating shelves, coat-rack and umbrella stand blocks the space from view upon entry; a sleeping alcove, adjoining shower/dressing area, and a dining alcove contribute to the room's plurality of use. Gray invoked the senses directly and indirectly in both architecture and furniture * for example, in the tile flooring underfoot that radiates heat from the sun or the cork-covered tea and dining tables that muffle sound. Her furniture invokes analogies with the body: in the flexible table that extends to meet the occupant of the bed, the drawers that pivot horizontally, or the hinged mirror that affords oblique views of the head. In those areas of the house where contact with the body is most intimate * the bedroom and bathroom * Gray strove to heighten bodily awareness. She provided the bathroom with a profusion of shimmering materials, including tiled walls, folding mirrors, and a polished aluminium tub enclosure, whose cool surfaces provided a soothing respite from the relentless Mediterranean sun. Gray's focus on the kinaesthetic, tactile and sensual potential of architecture and furniture in E.1027 derives from her interest in merging an aspiration for luxury, typical of the French decorative arts tradition, with the liberal social aims of the architectural avant-garde.   Gray avoided self-promotion; thus, aside from the special issue of L'Architecture Vivante that Badovici devoted to E.1027 (winter 1929), the house has received little critical attention in the annals of modern architecture. Joseph Rykwert initiated the re-examination of Gray's architectural contributions in a series of articles beginning in 1968. More recently, the series of murals that Le Corbusier painted on the villa's walls at Badovici's invitation in 1937-38 prompted a series of essays regarding Gray's attitude towards the Swiss architect. Although these murals departed from Gray's constructive integration of furniture and architecture, she objected only to the remarks he made about the house when he published the paintings ten years later; indeed, her admiration for Le Corbusier's architecture was undiminished. Rather than begin her designs from a set of theoretical precepts declared in a manifesto, an approach adopted by her more polemical colleagues, Gray challenged the all-encompassing claims of contemporary theorising by adapting a selective combination of modern movement precepts to address the occupants' physical, psychological and spiritual needs. By referring to and expanding on certain spatial devices of the modern movement, such as Le Corbusier's "five points of a new architecture," in her early buildings and projects, Gray sought to overcome the dehumanising qualities often associated with abstraction by engaging the subjective qualities of experience. "The poverty of modern architecture," Gray wrote during the 1940s, "stems from an atrophy of sensuality. Everything is dominated by reason in order to create amazement without proper research." Through a relatively small number of buildings and conjectural projects, Gray offered a significant challenge to the heroic ideals of the modern movement.  < BACK Caroline Constant