Photographer Jürgen Beck and Spector Books have launched Sun Breakers, a tome celebrating the architecture icon that is Eileen Gray’s E-1027 house. Presenting the home as an intimate, personal space, nestled into its landscape, instead of offering wide views that would 'falsely enlarge the space', the artist has captured a unique perspective on the modernist architecture piece that we are now all so familiar with – yet which still holds layers of experience and secrets to offer.
Sun Breakers by Spector Books
Sun Breakers, which launched in spring 2023, features a delicious selection of Beck's expert photography – the Zurich-based artist is a graduate from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany – and essays by art writer and translator Dorothee Elmiger. Graphic designer Ina Kwon is behind the book's overall look and layout. The team's aim was to create a dialogue between the natural landscape and the building, as well as between photography and architecture.
Looking at the building, inside and out, through the overgrowth around it, as well as peeking from inside out, Beck’s work searches for an 'expression of openness' and at the same time, intimacy.
'Beck moves inquisitively around the E-1027 house, which has only recently been elevated to an architectural icon. He takes summer strolls beside and into it, and avoids clear horizon lines or overviews that would enlarge what was planned as an intimate space for work, leisure and sport,' write the team.
Beck’s approach to the project is 'to encapsulate the design, characterised by its openness and lightness and what comes alive within it, in a story poised between glamour and critique'.
'Through the titular sun breakers, shutter-like screens from the Mediterranean sun, photographic and architectural locations lose their objective frames, and the space opens into an expression for other forms of living and working, a malleable structure for flexible days and relationships. He reveals a design that addresses psychological and emotional needs, that inscribes things with their own names and relationships long before auto-fiction and the affective turn.'
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