white walls

In 1938, while visiting a new villa built by the Irish designer Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier was inspired to "improve" on her work. He admired the white-walled classicism and industrial finesse of the home, which was built in the spirit of his own domestic architecture. But he thought it needed a little something.

And so Le Corbusier stripped naked, took out his paint brushes and covered the house with large, sexually provocative images. "One of the murals was on the previously spare white wall behind the living-room sofa, so that what had been specified by Gray to be a point of visual respite was now an animated scenario," writes Nicholas Fox Weber in his new biography, Le Corbusier: A Life. Gray, who admired Le Corbusier and was, like many architects, proprietary about her work, felt "raped" by the incident.

from Washington Post's review of Nicholas Fox Weber's new biography 'Le Corbusier - A Life'

The story reminded me of Beatriz Colomina's book Privacy and Publicity - and reading of the house E1027, a site of competition and rivalry between Gray and LC. The 'Murals at Cap Martin', apparently commissioned by Jean Badovici without Gray's consent, are in the house overlooking the site where Le Corbusier died swimming in 1965.

Le Corbusier's naked redecorating antics are hypocritical in light of his attitude to interior design. Charlotte Perriand was at first turned away as "cushion embroiderer" but later designed items like the LC2 armchair and the B306 chaise which added to Le Corbusier's fame.