Villa E

Listed in the Architecture category on Art In Fiction, Villa E (2024) by Jane Alison is inspired by the story of Irish designer Eileen Gray and famed Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Along the glittering coast of southern France, a white villa sits atop an earthen terrace—a site of artistic genius, now subject to bitter dispute. Eileen, a new architect known for her elegant chair designs, poured the concrete herself; she built it as a haven for herself and her lover, and called it E-1027. When the hulking Le G, a founder of modernist architecture, laid eyes on the house in 1929, he could see his influence in the sleek lines—and he would not be outdone. Impassioned, he took a paintbrush to the clean, white walls. Thirty years later, Eileen has not returned to Villa E and Le G has never left—his summers spent aging in a cabin just feet away. Mining the psyches of two brilliant, complex artists and the extraordinary place that bound them, Villa E boldly reimagines a now-legendary act of vandalism.  Jane Alison is the author of The Love-Artist, The Sisters Antipodes, and the craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative , among other titles. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.   Buy Now from Amazon Buy Now from Bookshop