VILLA E

A gorgeous new novel by Jane Alison, the author of one memoir, four novels and most recently MEANDER SPIRAL EXPLODE: Design and Pattern in Narrative, VILLA E centers around the complex relationship between Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray.

Focusing on the last week of Le Corbusier's life, VILLA E is a novel about two brilliant, complex people and the extraordinary place that bound thema white villa perched atop a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean in Roquebrune-Cap-Martinnow a World Heritage Site. It is a story of artistic and sexual obsession, of masculine power and predation, of guilt, and of the transformative power of memory.
Le Corbusier was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century, pioneering Modernist architecture and giving the world everything from pristine white villas to brutalist concrete office buildings to jet-age city plans. His contemporary, Irish designer Eileen Gray, was a far quieter figure, most known for her exquisite furniture. She taught herself architecture, too, although she made only two houses.
But the first of her houses, built in the twenties on the south coast of France, was a subtle feminist critique of the outspoken, infamous Le Corbusier. And it came to obsess himso much that he spent his last three decades infiltrating the house, taking it, and erasing her name.
Why? Was it the house that obsessed him, or Eileen?