Arne Jacobsen was a designer of everything. A trained architect, he designed the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. It was the city’s first skyscraper, a vision in sea-green glass and steel. He also designed dorm rooms, the tables and chairs of a cafeteria, amoeba-shaped doorknobs that nestled into the palm, and flatware that looked like speeding droplets of stainless steel ending in a (somewhat) functional eating tool. Jacobsen designed the past’s vision of the future, but his present hardly agreed with him. His skyscraper was long-considered the ugliest building in Copenhagen, and his flatware was widely hated for offering up too little food with each bite.
Gas Station by Arne Jacobsen, 1937
Eileen Gray
Visible from the sky. Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici's counter-modernist love palace.
“The biggest secret of E.1027 is that it offers spaces for secrets, having layers of interiors within its interiors.” –Katarina Bonnevier
Eileen Gray designed E.1027 for herself and her then lover, art critic Jean Badovici. She chose an isolated spot on the French Riviera right on the water, and made a house where the sun and sea would be visible from almost every room. The sea and sky floats into E.1027 through giant windows and balconies. She blurred the boundaries of inside/outside, and also upside/downside: the pattern of the floor creeps up to the walls and ceiling. One distinction she made clear is the one between public and private — the building is almost invisible to passersby. E.1027 is perched on a cliff over the Mediterranean without any direct roads leading to it. Born to a wealthy Scottish-Irish family in 1878, Eileen Gray lived well outside societal expectations, and she designed for the different kind of life she lived.
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