SUN BREAKERS / JURGEN BECK

Designed by Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray, Villa E-1027 has only recently acquired the status of an architectural icon. Jürgen Beck’s photographs capture the building with an approach that borders on research. Beck immortalizes the paths, overgrown with vegetation, that he takes to reach the house. He avoids views of the coast and the beach of the Côte d’Azur, as well as long shots, which would falsely enlarge the space, conceived as an intimate place of work and leisure. A dialogue is thus established between Jürgen Beck’s photographs and Eileen Gray’s architecture. In the same approach as the architect, the images seek an opening conducive to other forms of life and work, a flexible structure capable of adapting to the rhythm of the days and everyday situations. Beck directs our gaze towards a design that takes into account the psychological and emotional needs of people, and that gives things their own names and their own relationships. The images are accompanied by an essay by Swiss author Dorothee Elmiger, who extends Beck's view of Gray by introducing fragments of text that oscillate between analysis and impressionistic narrative.

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