Architectural Notation and the Body Condition: Tracking the dance of E1027

Abstract

This paper will explore two modernists pieces, one a ballet, Oskar Schlemmer’s The Triadic Ballet and the other a small holiday house on the Cote d’Azur, Eileen Gray’s E1027. I would like to suggest that the notated domestic occupation within the drawings of E1027 reveal an animated scene, a mechanical ballet inferring relationships among furniture, movement and the human body. Both the ballet and the house have been referred to as mechanical ballets.1 I propose a correlation between two seemingly unrelated projects of dance and architecture, enacted at a particular moment in history, as a means of establishing an architecture of performance and a performance of architecture. It is argued that the house becomes a setting for a continuing masque celebration. Through a discussion of the forms of representation of E1027 and the performance drawings of The Triadic Ballet I occupy the interior, activate the furniture, the cupboards and the closets with their secret and hidden spaces. The dancers and guests become participants and move over the surfaces of E1027, tracing and re-tracing their steps upon geometric patterning.