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Associate Professor Ray Kinoshita Mann headed to southern France for a couple weeks this summer to make a pilgrimage to E1027, the legendary house by Irish designer Eileen Gray built 1926-29.  Nearly destroyed at least twice—first by Nazis and later by a drug-crazed doctor—the house has been painstakingly restored in an ongoing multi-year effort by the non-profit Cap Moderne and its U.S. counterpart Friends of E1027.  The trip was partly underwritten by a UMass Teaching Excellence and Faculty Development grant for course development, in which she proposed to further develop teaching materials relating to Systems Thinking in design.  Mann posits that in addition to being a uniquely skilled and talented designer, that Gray is an exemplar of Systems Thinking, which can be described as a dynamic mode of problem-solving where multiple considerations and their mutual impact on each other are taken into account.  Scholars such as Peter Gray, Caroline Constant, and Jennifer Goff have demonstrated that Gray's early career as an artist and creator of interiors and furniture propelled her to transgress both gender, class, and even race boundaries to work side-by-side with artisans to an unusual degree.  Her intimate knowledge of materials and material processes—wood and lacquer, wools, metalwork—combined with a wry embrace of the expectations of the time that women manage all the details of daily life, yielded designs that were often more elegantly multi-functional, comfortable, AND buildable than those of her male Modernist counterparts such as Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer.
 
Mann was thrilled to be at E1027, able to poke around and look "under the hood" at moments and details not typically shown in publications—Gray's engaging solutions to electrical wiring, for instance.  She also spent time at the Gray archives and exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Museum of Ireland.  She can be seen here happily lounging in a reproduction of Gray's renowned Transat chair.