Abstract
In 1927, Irish furniture artist and architect Eileen Gray built her first residence, E.1027, on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. A queer woman herself, Gray conjoined the decorative elements of her furniture art with methods of articulating space in architecture, resulting in a residence that appeals to the human body in an emotionally-driven imaginative capacity, a deviation from the machine aesthetic that was the Modernist norm and a way of staking claim to space for sapphic identity in the twentieth-century built environment. This essay examines how twentieth-century artist and architect Eileen Gray used Modernist mechanical methods of persuasion infused with designed symbolic forms in her house E.1027 to fashion a legible lesbian identity in physical space. Critical analysis of the architectural elements of E.1027 and the space it engenders reveals Gray’s rhetorical strategies that are invoked to make a sexually-dissident sapphic identity intelligible, which makes visible rhetorical tactics that architects use to construct identity in space. By strategically using semiotic tactics of architectural communication, an embodied spatial rhetoric is created; an architect acts as a rhetor through the bodies of the observers in their space.
Modernism and the Nature of Architectural Rhetoric
In the 1929 issue of L’Architecture Vivante (“Living Architecture”), Irish artist and architect Eileen Gray was interviewed after the completion of her first house, E.1027, a Modernist residence in Cap Roquebrune-Martin in the South of France. Though she was in her fifties by the time her first residence was ever built, E.1027—a code of Gray’s and her lover’s initials intertwined in its name (E signifying Eileen; 10 signifying the first initial of her lover, J; and 7 signifying the first initial of Gray’s last name, G) —gained notoriety among the architectural establishment, especially the Modern movement led by white male European architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, followers of the Dutch De Stijl, and the Bauhaus.
A response to the Enlightenment and its heralding of scientific reasoning and meta-narratives such as “logic,” and “progress,” and Modernism sought to cleanse the world of its past, which was seen as an impediment to progress. The paradigm, beginning in the mid-19th century and ending on July 15, 1972, was defined by meta-narratives that believed in progress through science and technology, faith in totalizing explanations of history and culture, and strict order and control, which was applied to political, social, and familial units of hierarchy and organization. One of the important scientific findings of the time in the field of architecture was that the built environment had physiological affects on the human body, and because of Modernists’ all-consuming faith in the power of science, architects began to design residences as “machines for living in.” Health, and by proxy the regulation of bodies, became an obsessive preoccupation for Modern architects, perhaps "most obvious in the white walls that became Modern architecture’s look” (Rault 43). Modern meta-narratives surrounding the body become visible through white walls and other built elements as a “visible commitment to the ideas of moral, psychological, physiological, and radicalized social health” (Rault 43).
One core leader at the fore of the Modern project of regulating bodies through building was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known by his pseudonym Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier believed that a mechanized “machine for living” for humans embodied the values of Modernism by physically steeping the human body in a space that imitated the aesthetic of the technology of the present. In his 1926 manifesto Toward a New Architecture he outlined the five points of the “machine for living in” as pilotis, or free-standing columns in domino-like configurations in place of load-bearing walls; a free interior plan; a free facade, usually with floor-to-ceiling panes of glass pressed against the exterior edges; and horizontal windows. Although these points served as a structural basis, they also encouraged functional zoning in the home that supposedly maximized productivity. The five points created and emphasized gendered space that upheld the Modern ideal of the heterosexual, nuclear family as the central unit of social order; as the Modernists sought to cleanse the world of its past and precedents, bodies that were all the same were seen as fitting into a grand social narrative, and heterosexual bodies were valued because of their reproductive ability. Further, the points that created the “machine for living in” cultivated a “machine aesthetic” due to the industrial materials Modernists used for their adherence to the meta-narrative of structural honesty. In the Modern paradigm, “Armchairs were “machine[s] for sitting in”; ewers were “machines for washing oneself”; an airplane was a “machine for flying”; and the street was a “machine for traffic.” In sum, Le Corbusier saw in machines principles that, if acted upon, could remake all of social life—from houses, to chairs, to ewers, to planes, to streets. No less than these, Le Corbusier believed that rhetoric itself needed to be mechanized” (Tell 166). Designers used the mechanical rhetoric of the “machine for living” in furniture design, industrial design, interior design, and architecture to produce and regulate heterosexual, normative bodies that would function in the grand Modernist meta-narrative of cultural unity. The Modern body, defined by architectural language that was connoted as “pure” and “honest,” was measured against the nineteenth-century body, understood as “degenerate” due to its associations with visual ornament and decoration that did not serve an explicit purpose. Such excesses were viewed as extraneous and denigrating to Modern morality.
Architectural rhetoric is a multilevel force comprised of both object and sign (Massumi); in the built environment, the mechanics of the object have physical impacts on the human inhabitant of the space, a mechanical method of persuasion, as well as a symbolic meaning, drawing on inhabitants’ associations with designed elements in the environment to carry meaning. Modernists believed persuasion to be embodied and material in nature; most ignored the semiotic effects of architectural language to rely on embodied experience in space, or mechanical persuasion. The Modern paradigm saw architecture as exclusively mechanical; Modern architects tried to avoid the use and re-use of the symbolic signs of architectural language because they felt that historical elements lacked creativity (Jencks 53), or worse, spelled out dishonesty and regression into the past, when advancing into the future by breaking completely with history was the ultimate goal. Therefore, most Modern architects refused to acknowledge the symbolic importance of architectural “words,” repeated elements such as doors, windows, columns, partitions, and so forth (Jencks 53), relying on the mechanics of architecture to physically affect the audience.
What struck Modernists about E.1027 was its use of the Modern building typology, derived from Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture but infused with a rediscovery of “the human being in plastic expression, the human intention that underlies material appearance” (Gray 157), or the incorporation of human emotion and imagination into the built environment by using the semiotic effects of architectural language. As an architect, she understood the necessity of built space to contribute to human survival, but in modernity, Gray as a rhetor understood the ability of architecture to make inhabitants understand things about their passions and conditions of existence. Gray called upon architects to have an almost universal mind in approaching the creation of space, saying that “inspiration and faith can no longer provide knowledge as complex as that required today − knowledge of the conditions of existence, of human tastes and aspirations, passions and needs, as well as technical knowledge and material means” (Gray 156). Combining the physicality of embodied persuasion in mechanical rhetoric with the semiotics implicit in the malleability of architectural language, Gray created space that “respond[ed] to human needs and the exigencies of individual life, and ensur[ing] calm and intimacy” (Gray 157). Unlike the other “machines for living” that were being produced at the same time, E.1027 did not seek to perpetuate the norms of heterosexual bodies in its inhabitants; by eliminating gendered spatial separation that functionalism and the machine aesthetic cultivated, inhabitants’ identity was left open-ended (Massey 179).
The practice of identity in space was theorized in the decades after Modernism by critic Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life; writing on the embodied nature of space and place, de Certeau argues that the definition of place and space are not interchangeable. Place is the timeless “location and production of the powerful, is…the sphere of the panopticon,” (Dickinson 302) while space, on the other hand, is malleable, a “practiced place” changeable by everyday people’s interactions with it. Architects design space within timeless places, but that people can practice place is an important distinction because it reminds us that performances of people inhabiting the space impact it as much as any physically-constructed form, and bodies are the sites of architectural rhetoric; as Diana Agrest argues, “the dwellers—their clothes and gestures, their starts and stops—are as much of the architectural engagement as are buildings themselves” (Agrest 40). This is an argument that has been well developed by critics paying attention to intersectionality; thus, audience and rhetorical enactment are entwined, and together cohere an architectural rhetoric. The ordinary practitioners of space “follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’” (de Certeau 93) with their bodies as they walk; if space is the physical text, comprised of recognizable, repeatable architectural words and drawing on the inhabitants’ matching of experiences, contexts, and applied metaphor, then architectural rhetoric is not what is built by the rhetor, but a transaction between designed physical space and the audience that occurs at the site of an inhabitant’s body.
Fashioning Experiences of Identity in Space
The subject of this essay will focus on E.1027, but specifically Eileen Gray’s rhetorical tactics and the use of architectural language. Gray was an Irish furniture maker and architect whose work was not built until she was in her fifties; she spent most of her artistic life working as a lacquer furniture artist in Paris. Gray’s significance as an architect lies in her ability to infuse furniture and space with the kind of emotion and imagination that had been lost in Modern building practices while still engaging with the formal concepts of the time. Not until 1929 did she build her first structure, E.1027, now widely regarded as her masterpiece. E.1027 is a different kind of Modern architecture because while it engages with the building technology that had been popularized by Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture, Gray disrupts the expectations of a Modern residence in the interior through decorative elements, scene-breaking partitions and screens, and comfortable, sensually-appealing furniture, themes of the nineteenth-century decadent aesthetic that by 1929 would have been deemed morally degenerative.
At first glance, the house perfectly adheres to the Modernist building paradigm as outlined by Le Corbusier’s five points; it is supported by pilotis, freeing the interior plan of load-bearing walls to allow different configurations of space, horizontal ribbon windows open to a view of the Mediterranean Sea, there is a rooftop terrace, and because it is built with common industrial materials like concrete and iron rebar, the simplicity of the facade is maintained. But while Gray incorporated the Modernist innovations of the five points, she broke with the Modern project in the regulation of bodies in the interior. In her only published writing, a prose dialogue in L’Architecture Vivante describing E.1027 and engaging with Le Corbusier’s rhetoric on residences as “machines for living in”, Gray raises concern with Modernism’s regulation of subjective identity in the interior. She criticizes Modern architecture “precisely in terms of its suppression of intimacy and the private passions, needs, tastes and pleasures of the modern body” (Rault 45) that functionalism and meta-narratives around the importance of heterosexual social units altogether promoted. She argues that
“External architecture seems to have absorbed avant-garde architects at the expense of the interior…[which] leads to an impoverishment of the inner life by suppressing all intimacy…[Whereas today’s architecture demands] knowledge of the conditions of existence, of human tastes and aspirations, passions and needs…it must also encapsulate the most tangible relations, the most intimate needs of subjective life…only the human being should be considered—but the human being of a particular era, with tastes, feelings, and gestures of this era” (Gray 152).
I have stated previously that the Modern project was invested in the production and regulation of heterosexual subjects because normative bodies and their reproductive abilities were seen as central to social order; as with Modern buildings stripping off the superfluous ornament of the nineteenth century, bodies in that architecture were equally stripped to be made available for the new culture of mechanization. E.1027’s interior is instead engaged with the concepts of the decadent aesthetics of the nineteenth century, a space steeped in sensuality and intimacy antithetical to the machine for living. This is important because Modernists had tied decadent aesthetics to nineteenth-century homosexuality; by eliminating ornament in the home and spaces with “unproductive intent”—which Le Corbusier explicitly deemed “immoral” (Rault 45)—the Modernists sought to eliminate homosexuality or any form of non-normative body in the modern world. E.1027 doesn’t bring in antiques or interiors from the nineteenth century, but rather engages with the decadent aesthetic and its conceptual connotations. The central living area, rather than being maximized for productivity, is instead an invitation to luxuriate; there are multi-layered rugs, wool afghans, and extendable divans with cushions and blankets, all below a nautical map stenciled with a quote from Baudelaire, a nineteenth-century decadent poet. The space is designed for the lounging body, with divans in every room trays for holding drinks and cigarettes, lights for reading and writing, and electrical outlets for hot water. By eliminating productive space in the interior, gendered space is also eliminated.
Allowing Gray’s writing to inform my reading of E.1027 as a place raises questions about how Gray articulated identity in space. Who was the ‘human being’ of her era whom she saw neglected in Modern architecture? And what needs, tastes, and passions was she accommodating in the interior with the decadent aesthetic? I argue that by using specifically-coded architectural language in the creation of space in E.1027, Gray acted as a rhetor to articulate sexually-dissident sapphic identity in space that shaped the perception and legibility of that identity in twentieth-century modernity, as sexually-dissident female subjects’ values and desires were being denied space in Modernism’s moral meta-narratives. While I acknowledge that Gray’s sexual identity remains ambiguous because she never explicitly labeled her sexuality, she did openly have relationships with women throughout her life, and her position as a queer woman enabled her to disrupt heterosexual binaries articulated by the machine aesthetic in material space, which created space for sexually-dissident identities to exist and act in the Modern context. Gray’s rhetoric helped fashion the modern lesbian identity in physical space.
My analysis begins with an orientation to the existing field of research surrounding rhetorical space, architectural semiotics, and corporeality. I then examine E.1027’s space and analyze how Gray engages with the semiotic effects of architectural features to articulate sapphic, sexually-dissident identity, including how she uses strategies of disruption to affect inhabitants’ everyday practices of space. Finally, I address ways in which the discursive formation of identity through space affects the existence of queer people, the ability of space to affect its inhabitants’ identity and perspectives, and the implication of these findings in the responsibilities of architects who always act as rhetors in the creation of space. I use the word inhabitant to define the audience of Gray’s rhetoric perpetuated in and by E.1027; as one inhabits space there can be no possibility of neutral observation because their corporeal body is the physical site of spatial rhetoric. Further, the word inhabitant implies the necessity of human movement through and interaction with the space in order for rhetorical enactment to occur.
Disrupting Hegemony and Everyday Practices of Space
In this essay I will be using Sonja Foss’s method of feminist criticism as well as Michel de Certeau’s practices of everyday places to examine the strategies that Eileen Gray used as a rhetor in E.1027’s space to disrupt hegemonic beliefs about bodies occupying space, cultivate ambiguity surrounding identity in non-gendered spaces, reframe common perspectives about heterosexuality and nuclear family structures, and resource the Modern building typology to present a new perspective. Using these tactics, she provided a framework for inhabitants to practice space—and therefore identity—anew. Although I will be examining Gray’s ways of using these techniques as a rhetor, I as a critic am applying Foss’s method to Gray’s rhetoric because of the ways I observe Gray questioning the fundamental assumptions of identity as articulated in physical space. I chose feminist criticism as a method to study E.1027 and the rhetoric Gray cultivates within it because I see space in E.1027 as an explicit disruption of the dominant ideologies of Modernism, and as feminist rhetoric points to "alternative, non-dominating ways to live,” (Foss 142) Gray presents an alternate way to live in physical space by disrupting the conventions of gendered space that Modernism provided. I inflect Foss’s method with de Certeau’s observations of the practice of everyday places because it is critical to understand the way that inhabitants practice space in E.1027, and use their bodies as transactional sites to practice Gray’s rhetoric; here, Gray combines strategies of disruption to suggest practicing of place that differs from other Modern residences.
The data for this essay stems from an examination of Gray’s rhetoric in physical space, so I observed photographs of E.1027 in its original built state, watched the documentary “Gray Matters” on the life of Eileen Gray that provides video footage of E.1027’s interior, and read Gray’s interview on E.1027 in the 1929 edition of L’Architecture Vivante. I acknowledge that the data for this research is ultimately limited by my inability to visit E.1027 and occupy the physical space; much of my observations of E.1027 could be considered comparative because I focus on how E.1027 was so different from the other residences of first-generation Modernism and, as a result, its different rhetoric and rhetorical abilities. The body of the critic and the ability to inhabit the physical space is imperative to understanding its rhetoric because moving through the space, using it, reinventing it and moving it around make and unmake the space through the body; it “…is an everyday rhetoric, an everyday saying of selves, others, and spaces” (Dickinson 301).
Mechanisms of Identity in Space
Eileen Gray is one of the few women architects that was part of the Modernist establishment; that she was a queer woman celebrated in a field that was hegemonically white, male, and cisgender in the 1920s, when the aftermath of World War I had created a global “moral call to order,” is astonishing. Functioning in the framework of Modernist building typology, including the use of concrete and industrial materials, columns that created an open floor plan, and bespoke furniture, E.1027 is a different type of Modern architecture because it disrupts hegemonic perspectives of family structure in material space by disengaging from the Modernist “machine” perspective through decorative ornament and a decadent aesthetic; in breaking apart gendered space in the interior through symbolic use of architectural elements, Gray, a queer woman, articulates a sexually-dissident sapphic identity in Modern space, making lesbian identity in modernity legible in the physical world.
I will analyze Gray’s rhetorical strategies through the lens of Sonja Foss’s method of feminist rhetorical criticism and Michel de Certeau’s practice of everyday places, through which I find Gray disrupting the Modernist machine aesthetic, a singular mechanical rhetoric, by reframing visual elements in semiotic terms to generate new perspectives on the world and space the inhabitants occupy. In the architectural promenade of the home, which I define as the path a visitor takes through the interior as it unfolds, I have identified Gray using strategies of rhetorical disruption, such as generating multiple perspectives, cultivating ambiguity, and reframing, in material contexts. By using these strategies, Gray is able to stake claims to space for female sexually-dissident identities in the Modern world and redefine the nuclear family using the material structure of the single-family home. Critical analysis of E.1027 reveals the rhetorical strategies and discursive mechanisms through which architects act as rhetors in space, able to articulate identities and make visible certain groups in place; architects and designers then play a vital role not just in creating space for minority identities, but shaping them in the physical world and public consciousness.
Gray’s E.1027 disrupts hegemonic perspectives of nuclear family structure in order to claim agency for new identities and sexualities in modernity by creating spaces that are constantly in flux and difficult to identify, which creates an alternative perspective of who gets to occupy the space and therefore live in the Modern world. The hegemonic building paradigm in the late 1920s was structured around ideas of the single-family home as a “machine for living.” No space in the house was to have unproductive intent, and was all maximized for productive activity; this intent was reinforced by a building methodology that used industrial materials, such as concrete and steel, to reinforce the “machine aesthetic” visually. The machine aesthetic also reinforced binary heterosexual identities by creating clearly-defined gendered spaces, such as the boudoir, the study, the kitchen, and the family room. E.1027 uses a strategy of resourcement by engaging with this same building methodology while cultivating a decadent aesthetic in the interior as a way to question who gets to occupy Modern spaces and how; while the machine aesthetic articulates binary heterosexual identities in the Modern world, E.1027 subverts the gendered space of the machine aesthetic and therefore creates the possibility for new identities’ existence in Modern space. The decadent aesthetic that E.1027 cultivated through the use of furs, the color red, leather chairs, and built-in living room divans have no motives for productive activity; on the contrary, they are comfortable to the physical body and promote restful states. Often, because of these decorative elements’ appeals to the five senses (primarily visual and tactile appeal), decadent elements are connoted with elements of sexual spaces; for example, the soft padded leather and voluptuous curves of bespoke chairs, such as Gray’s Bibendum Chair, is specifically meant for conversation and socializing. Divans make a seated person support themself on the side body or back, not a seated position for “productive” activity but for sleeping, cuddling, or sex. Creating common space in the house with the express intent of providing physical comfort highly connoted with sex disengages the house from the “machine” perspective and invites inhabitants to imagine different kinds of people inhabiting Modern spaces.
Gray continues to generate multiple perspectives in an interrogation of nuclear family structure by using screens and partitions, as individuals are forced to examine the transitional nature of E.1027’s space and arrive at new understandings of residential space as they move through the house. In the decadent interior decor, individuals are offered a new perspective on the single-family home’s common space as well as an understanding of their own perspective through transitional spatial elements, such as wardrobes that become walls and Gray’s “Brick Screen” which allows inhabitants fractured glimpses of the space beyond the partition. The living-space-to-boudoir transitional space offers individuals a new possibility of how a house might be organized and for who. New physical perspectives presented in the material context are used rhetorically to generate new perspectives on occupied space; visual perspectives subverted by screens, partitions, and ribbon windows that both obstruct clear lines of sight through the house as well as dissolve and shift architectonic elements communicate that the living space in E.1027 is not clearly defined by function. What is instead relayed is that space in E.1027 is constantly shifting to suit the imaginative and emotional needs of its inhabitants, and because there is no clearly delineated functional gendered space, the space allows sexually-dissident identities to be read as legible in Modernist space. By staking a claim to space for sexually-dissident female identities, Gray articulates their presence in the Modern world. While the machine aesthetic promotes clearly-defined spaces that articulate heterosexual binary identities through the ways it mitigates bodily productivity, reproductivity, and delineates normative gender roles, Gray’s emphasis on comfort and leisure in E.1027 are a technique of reframing space for sapphic identities to make them legible in the Modern world.
The “spatial striptease” of the architectural promenade, through which the house gradually reveals itself as a inhabitant moves through and interacts with it, creates suspense and cultivates a dialectic between concealment and revelation, solidity and dissolution, and movement and stasis that alters the visual shape of Modernist building typology in order to make identities beyond the heterosexual binary legible in the Modern world. Though the house embraces an open floor plan supported by pilotis rather than load-bearing walls, the interior view is skewed by ribbon windows and there are no clear lines of sight through the house, which prevents narrative closure by forcing inhabitants to continue moving into the house if they want to experience it. By creating a spatial experience that requires inhabitant interaction and sensory engagement in order to understand it, Gray generates new perspectives of who gets to live in Modern space and how. And by deviating from the functional binary of hegemonic Modern space, Gray provides a new living experience that explores the possibility of people who deviate from heterosexual, binary structures—their identities and their sexualities—existing in the Modern world.
Using rhetorical tactics of disruption in a material context, Gray’s rhetoric forces individuals to examine their own perspective of how a house should be organized and for who, and are offered a new possibility through reframing of Modernist building methodology, generating a multiplicity of new physical perspectives that invite imaginative possibility in architected space, and cultivating ambiguity in physical space. These tactics alter the shape of space in the newly Modern world in this time period, and provide a qualitatively new experience of space so that different types of people beyond the heterosexual nuclear family could have legible spaces in Modernity.
Articulating Sexually-Dissident Identities: Bodies and Space in Modernity
An analysis of Eileen Gray’s E.1027 shows how Gray drew on the visual persuasion of Modernist mechanical rhetoric to make an argument that intersected concepts of semiotic architecture and rhetorical space, as well as how mechanical rhetoric functions to enact bodily change. Roxanne Mountford, in her 2009 essay “On Gender and Rhetorical Space,” defines rhetorical space as “the effect of physical spaces on a communicative event,” (Mountford 42); rhetorical space is the geography of a communicative event, where the subjective human mind meets and manipulates material space—as de Certeau would say, an everyday practicing of place. David Tell defines the mechanical rhetoric of Modernism, perpetuated by Le Corbusier and other followers, as “…very different from a symbolic rhetoric. It emphasizes the materiality of rhetoric and the embodied nature of persuasion” (Tell 168). The mechanical rhetoric of the 1920s, then, was figured as a way to affect emotions via striking them physically. The dominant architectural theory of the time, perpetuated by Le Corbusier, was:
“Architecture, which is a thing of plastic emotion, should . . . USE ELEMENTS CAPABLE OF STRIKING OUR SENSES, OF SATISFYING OUR VISUAL DESIRES, and arrange them in such a way THAT THE SIGHT OF THEM CLEARLY AFFECTS US through finesse or brutality, tumult or serenity, indifference or interest. . . . These forms, which are primary or subtle, supple or brutal, act on our senses physiologically (sphere, cone, cylinder, horizontal, vertical, oblique, etc.) and shake them up” (Corbusier 95).
Gray employed these dominant, mechanical methods of persuasion for a few reasons; first, because architecture caters to sensory interaction, its visual evidence seems convincing; second, by using mechanical persuasion to delivery rhetoric, sensory interaction allows Gray to build an argument within the bodies of E.1027’s inhabitants. E.1027 highly appeals to the senses through use of color and enticingly tactile materials that stimulate the body and therefore stimulate the mind; by arousing the body with the architectural elements of material space, inhabitants embody Gray’s rhetoric. Gray’s elements, as Le Corbusier prescribes, are capable of striking the senses; interaction between inhabitants and interior space in E.1027 becomes “a physical representation of relationships and ideas” (Mountford 42).
But Gray didn’t just employ the mechanical method of persuasion to enact rhetoric at the site of E.1027’s inhabitants’ corporeal bodies; Gray also capitalized on the semiotics of architectural language in the interior to articulate sexually-dissident sapphic identity via metaphor, syntax, and semantics. Mountford describes the “social imaginary” existing within a spatial dimension of culture, a sense of locational place as having hierarchies and forming relationships with and between human inhabitants; she says that “material space and social imaginary work in tandem: material spaces can trigger the social imaginary because of the historical and cultural freight attached to the space” (Mountford 49). Here I draw on Charles Jencks’s definitions of the language of architecture to describe how Gray uses the social imaginary surrounding degenerative images of female homosexual and sexually-dissident identities to make space in E.1027 intelligible as a sapphic space. The architectural metaphor is “a matching of one experience to another,” (Jencks 40), or the process by which an inhabitant sees a building or specific architectural element in terms of another. Gray uses a constellation of architectural words (previously defined as repeatable, recognizable built elements) that metaphorized sexually-dissident sapphic identity by virtue of their decadence and ornament, and thus their associations with degeneracy and homosexuality. The Modern project of policing bodies vilified and criminalized decadent aesthetics in the interior (Rault 46); therefore, the subjects for whom this space was designed—people who were not men, not cisgender, and/or not heterosexual—would have read this space as a claim for their inclusion in Modernity.
By infusing visual methods of persuasion—the Modernist mechanical rhetoric—with symbolism that articulated Gray’s own sexually-dissident identity, Gray articulated space in E.1027 that made sexually-dissident sapphic identity legible in physical space. What is particularly significant about the identity that is articulated in E.1027’s interior is not just the fact that it was one of the first Modernist buildings to embrace and capitalize on the semiotic affects of architectural forms, but that it used those to articulate a rhetoric that appeals to an observer’s corporeal body; E.1027’s argument is made by its rooms and furniture, but its rhetoric is conveyed through audience bodies. Therefore, through an analysis of Gray I found that rhetoric of the body and rhetorical space are more intrinsically connected than previous scholarship has suggested because while rhetors (architects) design physical space to articulate an argument, the rhetoric perpetuated by space is not conveyed without human bodily interaction with the space itself.
These findings have implications beyond the rhetoric of E.1027, which shows just one instance of a rhetor intentionally using the semiotics of spatial forms to enact change on visitors’ bodies. Gray shows how by using symbolic, designed tactics of built space, an embodied spatial rhetoric is created. An architect acts as a rhetor through the visitors and observers of their space. That space carries meaning has been covered by past scholarship; I am arguing that architects conceive of and articulate arguments in physical space, but the rhetoric is enacted by the bodies of the audience, the inhabitants, within a physical space. Thus, as I argued earlier, there can be no neutral interaction with physical space. The corporeal body—its visceral, psychological, and imaginative reactions—embodies the rhetoric of physical space’s argument.
Conclusion and Beginning: Towards a Sapphic Architectural Rhetoric
Keeping in mind the multilevel power of architectural rhetoric as both a mechanical and symbolic concern, it is then evident that architects can articulate an argument, but cannot act as rhetors without human interaction with their designed space. Our experience with physical space is crucial for architects’ rhetorical enactment, and our daily practice as audience inhabitants of space shape and contribute to the broader situation of architectural rhetoric. Bearing in mind that architectural language is sensual, and therefore more malleable than written language, architects draw on the semiotic and mechanical abilities of built forms to articulate identity.
This is both a great opportunity and a great drawback to architectural rhetoric; architects can act to articulate and make legible queer identity in space by making sensually and logically-appealing arguments, a dialectic which strengthens the discourse. But because architectural rhetoric is transactional, steeped in physical experience, and embodied by the inhabitants of a space, there is a great limitation to the dispersion of architectural rhetoric. Rhetorical criticism of architecture requires an embodied experience in the space, an everyday practice of space, in order to understand what the architect is articulating. And even then, there can be no objective judgment or understanding of a physical space’s rhetoric; its sensual appeals and networks of meaning ensure a variety of translations as infinite as there are inhabitants.
Dickinson writes truthfully that “…when we translate the richness of the embodied experiences into critical discourse much more is lost than is captured” (Dickinson 308). But I argue that the work is worth doing; architectural rhetoric shapes the people that we are, our values, our desires. If architects have such a great ability to shape our identities through rhetorical mechanisms, then they have an even greater social responsibility to create just, equitable spaces for the myriad gender, racial, and sexual identities that have been left out of architecture and the built environment long before the Modern era.
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