Shimul Javeri Kadri on reclaiming Eileen Gray at ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2025

Few architects embody independence as fully as Eileen Gray, whose life and work formed the subject of E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea (2024), screened at the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai, India during the running of ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2025. The film was followed by an ~epilog(ue) from Shimul Javeri Kadri, founder of SJK Architects, who drew connections between Gray’s contested authorship and broader questions of voice, recognition and power in architecture. Conceived as part of the festival’s ~log(ue) programming, these sessions are designed to extend the conversation beyond the screen, inviting practitioners to respond with personal reflections.

Kadri began by situating the audience in the life of Gray—the Irish architect and designer trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London before moving to Paris, where she built a reputation for uniting material craft with an enduring sense of comfort and beauty. Her lacquer furniture and chair designs remain iconic, however her most celebrated work was realised between 1926 and 1929: E.1027, a modernist villa on the French Riviera, was designed in collaboration with her partner Jean Badovici.

Gray’s story, Kadri noted, unfolded against a backdrop of upheaval. “She lived through two world wars, much heartbreak and a century of extraordinary events,” the Indian architect remarked, underscoring how Gray’s practice emerged not from ego but from a commitment to the act of creation itself. Yet despite her innovations, Gray’s authorship was frequently overshadowed, something the film and Kadri’s reflections sought to redress.

For Kadri, the villa embodied Gray’s conviction that modernist architecture should be both functional and emotional. “It was a machine for living, but with the emotion of living at its heart,” she observed. Kadri noted that this attention to human life reflected Gray’s independence and her refusal to be bound by conventions as she drew on one of Gray’s own remarks to frame this spirit, “I like doing things but I hate possessing them”. Kadri read this as evidence of a designer who prized the liberty of creating over the burden of owning.

The amazing act of regaining freedom without possession and without ego is the subject of this film. – Shimul Javeri Kadri

The house, however, became the site of erasure. Years after its completion, Le Corbusier painted murals directly onto its walls without Gray’s consent describing his actions as attempts “to violently destroy the wall, to remove it from its sense of stability.” For Kadri, these interventions revealed not homage but domination: “It seems apparent that he was wielding power, systematically effacing Gray’s authorship,” she argued, pointing to how the villa was long misattributed to Badovici and later celebrated more for Corbusier’s murals than for Gray’s architecture.

As someone whose own practice continues to grapple with questions of authorship and sensitivity balancing community, climate and context, Kadri used the ~epilog(ue) not to close but to open a line of questioning. She ended with a provocation that extended architecture into public life:

Her reflections reframed E.1027 not merely as a landmark of modernism but as a contested terrain; one that exposes how histories of architecture are inseparable from struggles over power, voice and recognition.

With ADFF:STIR Mumbai geared to return to the National Centre for the Performing Arts in 2026, we look back to key conversations from the ~log(ue) programme and highlights from the 2025 edition. Stay tuned for more throwbacks and exciting updates to be released in the coming weeks.