Over her career Eileen Gray designed nearly fifty works of architecture. Only three were ever realized.
Each holding a degree in architecture, Egg Collective’s three co-founders — Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis and Hillary Petrie — know firsthand that architecture is a male-dominated industry. However, while scouting potential photoshoot locations, they were struck by how few works of female-authored historic architecture are documented or exist in the present day. Designing Women IV: Eileen Gray’s House for Two Sculptors was born out of a desire to address this chasm. They wondered, what if, through modern technology, an unbuilt work of female-authored architecture could be realized and therefore lifted from obscurity? This line of questioning set them off on a journey through architectural archives and eventually into a conversation across time with the late Eileen Gray.
One of Eileen Gray’s architectural works that never made it past pencil on paper was the House for Two Sculptors. Upon her passing at the age of 98, the House for Two Sculptors lived on in Gray’s archive as a rarely published set of basic hand drawings. Conceived of in 1933, its clients, site and broader inspiration have been lost to history. Reading that the plan for the House for Two Sculptors was designed around an “egg-shaped” atelier, a seed was planted. After gaining permission to do so, Egg Collective’s co-founders set out on a years long journey of discovery, research and inspiration in order to digitally bring Eileen Gray’s original plans to life.
Aiming to exemplify ideas sketched out by Grey but never completed in her lifetime, the project entailed carefully retracing the marks left by Eileen’s hand, as well as the study of her aesthetic, ethos and legacy. Throughout the process, Egg Collective endeavored to stay true to the unmistakable creative language Eileen Gray developed over the course of her long career while also asserting the inspiration she had on subsequent generations of designers, themselves included. Designing Women IV: Eileen Gray’s House for Two Sculptors documents this process and invites viewers to imagine what it would be like to inhabit the House for Two Sculptors had it been built via a series of photorealistic renderings, and an exhibition on view at the company’s Tribeca Gallery. The exhibition will open to the public on May 15th wherein vignettes inspired by both the House for Two Sculptors and Eileen Gray’s unmistakeable design language will be presented alongside designs by Egg Collective and artworks by two contemporary sculptors and friends: Taylor Kibby and Molly Haynes.
A limited edition exhibition catalog documenting the project is also available for purchase here. Proceeds from the sale of the catalog will be donated to Girls Garage, a non-profit design and construction school for girls and gender-expansive youth working to help change the demographic makeup of the industries that create and author the physical world.
