Victor Horta (6 January 1861 – 8September 1947) was a Belgian architectand designer. Horta is one of the mostimportant names in Art Nouveauarchitecture. His design for the HotelTassel in Brussels (1893-4), for instance, isseen by art critics as the first example ofArt Nouveau being introduced intoarchitecture from the decorative arts -thanks to the use of revolutionary artistic,technological and compositionalelements. In 1932 King Albert I of Belgiumconferred on Horta the title of Baron forhis services to architecture. Four of thebuildings he designed have beendesignated a UNESCO World HeritageSite.

Interior; Hotel Tassel

• The stylistic revolution represented by these works is characterized by their open plan and the three-dimensional articulation of space, the diffusion of light, and the brilliant joining of the curved lines of decoration with the structure of the building. The use of iron, for instance, as a material for both construction and decoration, is Horta's unique contribution.

• Other important Brussels buildings designed by Horta include: the Hotel Winssingers (1895-6); the interior of the Hotel van Eetvelde (1895-8); La Maison du Peuple (1896-1898); Hotel Solvay (1895-1900); Dubois House (1901); the shop known as Magasins Waucquez (1903); Palais des Beaux-Arts (1928) and the Central Railway Station (1937).

• After a stay in the United States (1916-19), Horta fell back on a more traditional and severe style which borrowed from classical Greek architecture.

OTHER WORKS

The sculpture room

Palais des Beaux-ArtsBrussels, 1919-1928

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• Until the late nineteenth century, the architecture was based onhistoricism, heavily influenced by ancient classical traditions.

• Insisting on remodeling the old formulas, the architects producedbuildings devoid of any originality architecture, repeating shapesand extremely attached to traditional artistic culture that existedhitherto concepts.

• By 1890, however, with the breakthrough of industrialization andconsequent discovery of new materials and constructionmethods, begins, in general, dissatisfaction with this eclecticatmosphere that made the architecture subject to historical stylesand prejudices of the past.

• Artists from around the world longed for a renewed architecturethat accompany the progress of science of his time, leavingbehind the old artistic rules and resolving the issue of newlydiscovered architectural language used until then.

• Within this context of new discoveries and overcoming the oldtraditions, not only the architecture, but the artistic culture ingeneral is revalued to broaden the traditional field of art, based onthe modern conception of the world that was increasingly evident.

• Then arises as a result of this crisis, a new way to create,descendant of young artists who put into practice a new style withoriginal ideas, forms and bold experiences and increasingly distantfrom the old repertoire of schools.

• Both in painting, in architecture, design or any other form of artproduction, the new style is characterized by the spirit ofinnovation, facing the artistic culture as a whole.

• With the absence of certain excesses and increased exposure ofthe materials of reason used, the Art Nouveau movement wasinspired by the English Arts and Crafts (arts and crafts) - which hadthen restored the value of craftsmanship and artistic work - buthad new forms and different designs that were inserted inside anindustrial production.

• In an attempt to transform the industrial decorative arts, this stylealso brings the ornament in a different way than hitherto existedvision, so that the ornament not only complete the structure, butis part of the object instead of being "glued" to this one.

• Besides the abandonment of historical styles, attempt insertionof art in everyday life and the structural organization according tothe function are other common features of the movement, whichsome authors even consider one of the first steps toward modernart.

6 January: Victor Horta born in Ghent, the son of a shoemaker.

Enrolled in the school of architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Ghent.

Left for Paris, where he entered the studio of the interior designer Jules Debuysson.

13 June: death of Horta's father. The young Horta returns to Belgium.

His first marriage and the move to Brussels, where he enrolled at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts.

Winner of the Godecharle prize for architecture with his plans for a new parliament building.

Designed three houses in the Twaalfkamerenstraat in Ghent.

Winner of the triennial competition organised by the Brussels Académie des Beaux-Arts for its former students with his project for a natural history museum building.

Visited the Great Exhibition in Paris (Eiffel Tower, Galerie des Machines). Thanks to Balat, commissioned to design a pavilion to house Jef Lambeaux's sculpture "Les Passions humaines" (Human Passions).

Simone Horta born. The Matyn house, 50 Rue de Bordeaux in Saint Gilles, Brussels.

Appointed professor in the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, a post he resigned in 1911.

The Autrique house, 286 Chaussée de Haecht in Schaerbeek, Brussels. The Tassel house, 6 Rue Paul-Emile Janson in Brussels.

Became president of Central Society of Architecture in Belgium. The Frison house, 37 Rue Lebeau in Brussels. The Solvay mansion, 224 Avenue Louise in Brussels.

The Van Eetvelde mansion, 4 Avenue Palmerston in Brussels (extended in 1898-1901). The 'Maison du Peuple', Place E. Vandervelde in Brussels (demolished in 1965-1966). The kindergarten, 40 Rue Saint-Ghislain in Brussels. The Deprez-Van de Velde mansion, 3 Avenue Palmerston in Brussels.

House and studio, 23-25 Rue Américaine in Saint-Gilles (which became the Horta museum in 1969).

Divorced in 1906. Second marriage, to a Swede, Julia Carlsson.

Horta is given the task of reorganising the courses at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

Appointed director of this same Academy for a period of three years.

Attended the 'Reconstruction of Belgium' congress in London. The German authorities learnt of his journey. Unable to return home, Horta went to America, where he remained until January 1919.

Sold his house and studio in the Rue Américaine. Drew the first plans for the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (inaugurated in 1928).

Appointed professor at the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp.

Architect of Belgium's 'Pavillon d'honneur' at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. Appointed director of the Fine Arts section of the Académie Royale de Belgique.

Horta made a baron.

Final plans for the Central Station in Brussels.

Began writing his Mémoires.

Pulped part of his personal archives.

Died on 8 September.

*Important works this Colour

IMPORTANT WORKS

HOTEL TASSEL• The design had a groundbreaking semi open-plan floor layout for

a house of the time.• It incorporated interior iron structure with curvilinear botanical

forms, later described as “biomorphic whiplash”.• Ornate and elaborate designs and natural lighting were concealed

behind a stone façade to harmonize the building with the more rigid houses next door.

• The building has since been recognized as the first appearance of Art Nouveau in architecture.

• Use of sgraffito.• Distribution house lies in two areas:

1. Access by the main staircase, which relates the lobby (common area of the house) with two large bedrooms with views over the street. 2. Garden side, served by a secondary staircase.

• A Living room, belonging to the second floor of the building, has a higher elevation than the hall, so that we have an internal dynamic space.

• Decoration of the walls and floor passes mosaics, stained glass, rows of decorative forms.

• Horta made a break with the past here by using stone and the modern material, metal, in domestic architecture.

• He created buildings of simple and sober structures, busy facades with large windows and functional interior, the decor allied to structural elements and dilated spaces using sets of mirrors and paintings illusory.

• A large bay window extendingover two stories, dominatesthe front facade.

• While the entrance isshaded by theclassical overhanginglintel with enormousbrackets, the rest ofthe central bay isglazed and featuresthe lightest and mostslender of metalsupports.

• The facade includes classicalelements like moldings andcolumns but here some ofthe columns are iron, notstone, and the entablature ismetal, complete withexposed rivets. The exposedrivets seem part of thedecorative program.

• The bowing forward of theentire central bay hasparallels with the linearcurves within. Apparently,the interior is even morestriking in its use of linearinterior architecture as wellas curvilinear decoration onwalls, stairways, and floors.

The Entrance from Inside

Plan of the entrance of one of the rooms, showing their mosaics

Room / Living Room

Level connected by stairs

Detail of wall decoration

HORTA MUSEUM

The Horta Museum is located in the private house andstudio of Victor Horta. Built between 1898 and 1901, it is typical ofArt Nouveau at its height. This is not a museum in the traditionalsense: a building where the objects exposed draw all the attention.Here it is the reverse : the building itself is the museum. Heinhabited the house from 1901 to 1919. The interior decoration haslargely been retained, the mosaics, stained glass, and walldecorations forming a harmonious & elegant whole, down to thelast detail.

The museum also contains a collection of furniture drawnby Victor Horta and typical of Art Nouveau at its best. It also showsold photographs, scale models, casts and plans explaining the workof the architect.

This house alsoshows one of the greatinnovations of Horta: therooms are built around acentral hall. From thebeautiful glass ceiling lightfalls into the house andthereby creating a muchmore natural illuminationof the building than wasthe case in the traditionallate 19th century houses inBrussels and Belgium.

La Maison du Peuple (demolished)

• Victor Horta’s La Maison du Peuplewas built in Brussels over the years 1896-99. It was situated on Place Emile Vandervelde, near to the Sablon.

• It was destroyed in the year 1965 as an act of barbarism in the squalid interests of speculative development, appears to have resisted most attempts at analysis.

• In spite of a rather restrictive very irregular building place along acircular square and on a slope, Horta succeeded to construct abuilding with maximum functionality.

• The building provided rooms for several aims like offices, coffeeshops, shops, meeting rooms and a party hall.

• The building had been mainly constructed in white iron (morethan 600,000 kilogrammes) glass and masonry façade, and a light-filled interior with exposed ironwork and much fine detailing.Fifteen craftsmen worked for eighteen months on the iron work.

• To make this construction possible, Horta drew no less than 8,500square meters of plans.

• The building was completed in 1899 and was considered a masterwork.

• Because of the experimental combination of brick, glass and steelthis building was considered as an example of modernarchitecture.

Plan

Section

Auditorium

HOTEL SOLVAY

Hotel Solvay is a large Art Nouveau town house designed by Victor Horta on the Avenue Louise in Brussels.

• The house was commissioned by Armand Solvay, the son of the wealthy Belgian chemist and industrialist Ernest Solvay.

• Horta designed every single detail; furniture, carpets, light fittings, tableware and even the door bell.

• He used expensive materials such as marble, onyx, bronze, tropic woods etc.

• For the decoration of the staircase Horta cooperated with the Belgian pointillist painter Théo van Rysselberghe.

• The Hôtel Solvay and most of its splendid content remained intact thanks to the Wittamer family.

• They acquired the house in the 1950s and did the utmost to preserve and restore this magnificent dwelling.

• The house is still private property and can only be visited by appointment and under very strict conditions.

• The Hôtel Solvay was built from 1895 to 1898, with furniture completed in 1903.

• In 1957 the building became the seat of a fashion house; in 1980 the owners started the restoration of the building, including the restitution of the glass roofs of the main staircase, cooling of the interior decoration, and restoring the façade.

• The stylistic revolution represented by these works is characterised by their open plan, the diffusion of light, and the brilliant joining of the curved lines of decoration with the structure of the building.

• The Town Houses of Victor Horta in Brussels bear exceptional witness to its radical new approach.

• It is the best preserved of all Horta's house and still maintains its interior intact, including original art objects and the utilities in functional order

HOTEL VAN

EETVELDE

• The Hotel van Eetvelde in Brussels was designed in 1898 by Victor Horta, undoubtedly the key European Art Nouveau architect.

• While most other architects flirted with the new style, Horta found it gave the best expression to his ideas.

• His skill is demonstrated in his ability to slip his domestic designs into narrow constricted sites.

• The interiors become of great importance as centres of light, which permeates through the filigree domes and skylights—usually in the centre of the building.

• The Hotel van Eetvelde is a remarkable example of the way Horta handled the situation and used it to highlight the imposing staircase, which leads up to the first-floor reception rooms.

• The visible application of "industrial" materials such as steel and glass was a novel for prestigious private dwellings at the time. In the Hôtel van Eetvelde Horta also used a hanging steel construction for the façade.

• The interior receives additional lighting through a central reception room covered by a stained-glass cupola.

The Hotel Van Eetvelde

• An extension to the house was designed by Horta in 1898. This building has a more conventional, beautifully detailed sandstone façade.

• It was designed to house a garage, an office for van Eetvelde as well as supporting apartments and therefore had a separate entrance (2 Avenue Palmerston).

Filigree Domes Delicate ornamental works of

gold, copper, silver, etc.

Hotel van Eetvelde interior Horta's use of iron and glass

frames with Art Nouveau ornamentation, shows the

strength and delicacy of the materials.

The top story with carved tendrils in stone and elaborate ironwork

The recessed entrance with the upper floors resting on metal consolesCenter: colonnettes with plant-like capitals; mosaic decoration on the

facade

WAUCQUEZ DEPARTMENT STORE(Now The Belgian Comic Strip Center)

• Victor Horta designed this department store for Charles Waucquez and it became a shop unlike any other.

• When Charles Waucquezcommissioned Horta, he was not eager to have an Art Nouveau building so the design (certainly the exterior) is less obviously in that style than Horta'searlier works.

• “It was like the concourse of a station...The iron staircases, withdouble spirals opened out in bold curves...the iron bridges,thrown acrosd the void, ran straight along, very high up...all thismetal formed a delicate piece of architecture, a complicatedlacework through which the daylight passed, the modernrealization of a dream-palace…” - Emile Zola, The Ladies’Paradise

• The shop closed in 1970 and a few years later the architect JeanDelhaye, a student of Horta's, succeeded in bringing theWaucquez warehouse, which had become an endangeredmasterpiece, to public attention. The building was listed.andwas bought by the Belgian government to convert into amuseum of bande desinées in 1984.

• The exterior is stone, without exposed metal.

• But, the window frames have gentle sinuous curves and wrought iron grates-with rather less elaborate designs than other Art Nouveau buildings have.

The interior has a coloured glass mezzanine with the kind of ceiling light well that Horta used in domestic interiors.

• Now restored, this house built by Victor Horta for his own use is one of the best example of Art Nouveau in Brussels.

• Although constrained by funds, he was able to let his creativity run freely when designing the house.

• The design responded to the professional and family needs of the architect, and were built in 1898-1901 on two lots in a fashionable district of the town.

• Horta designed his house distributed around the stair way by half floors. The stair way is topped by a veranda.

Maison privée et atelier de Victor Horta

• After his divorce, he leased the building for a while, but then continued living there, making changes in the interior; a terrace and a winter garden were added and the atelier was enlarged.

• The facade is built from stone and has delicately designed metal railings.

• The most spectacular element in the building is represented by the vast glass ceiling over the main staircase.

• In 1919 the buildings were sold to Major Henri Pinte and in 1926 the two parts of the building were separated.

• In 1961 the Commune of Saint Gilles acquired the residential part for a museum of Horta's work.

After, Horta'swork became more pedestrian: his Central Railway Station (1911–37), and his Palais des Beaux-Arts (1919–28), both in Brussels, have reinforced-concrete structures, and lack all the grace and charm of the Art Nouveau work. He designed numerous funerary and other monuments.

Brussels Central Station

Important Points to Remember

Horta’s works are recognizable by their-• Open plan- Horta’s most works are based on narrow, linear

spaces. These spaces are very difficult to design in terms of natural light and ventilation. So to overcome this difficulty, he had to make the building plans open. This allowed free circulation along the building, as the main staircase was placed centrally, and later allowed the property to be sold in parts (Hotel Tassel and Maison privée et atelier de Victor Horta).

• Three-dimensional articulation of space- Use of Mezzanines and stairways centrally, creating common lobbys as a transition space.

• The diffusion of light- By mezzanines, filigree domes and glass roofs along the main staircase. Also he incorporated mirrors as a decorative feature which too helped in diffusion of light. Allowed entry of natural light even in very narrow ad long buildings.

• The use of large areas of glass and the linear iron supports allows for a delicate, almost transparent approach.

• The brilliant joining of the curved lines of decoration with the structure of the building.

• The use of wrought iron as a material for both construction and decoration as it is versatile, appropriate for both structural and decorative uses .He also left load-bearing columns exposed, making them become a decorative feature.

• Horta has echoed the curves in the balustrading with the curved stairs, tiled mosaic floor and the painted wall designs- influence of ‘Biomorphism’, i.e., influenced by nature and vegetation, and incorporated their curves tendrils in his designs.

Important Points to Remember

• http://www.hortamuseum.be/en/house/virtual-tour• http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/belgium/brussels/tassel/horta.html• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVgpksxhxB8• http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Baron_Victor_Horta.aspx• http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/architecture/victor-horta.htm• http://www.slideshare.net/hemantkandpal9/victor-horta-work-and-influences• http://www.topsightseeing.com/belgium/brussels/attractions/belgiumcomicstripc

enter.htm• http://www.alanainsworthphotography.com/p905083315/h403E4B02#h403e4c9e

• Global History of Architecture- Francis D. K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek, Vikramaditya Prakash

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