Victor Horta
With the Hôtel Tassel of 1893 Horta showed that iron could be shaped like plants and left visible indoors. His town houses in Brussels, among them the Hôtel Solvay and his own home, are a World Heritage Site.
Victor Horta was born in Ghent in Belgium in 1861, the son of a shoemaker. He first studied music and then architecture at the academy of fine arts in Ghent, and spent some time in Paris, working for an architect and decorator. After his father’s death he moved to Brussels and studied at the academy of fine arts there. He became assistant to Alphonse Balat, the king’s architect, and worked on the great glasshouses at the palace of Laeken, where iron and glass were used on a large scale. The encounter between his classical training and modern construction proved decisive. In the 1880s he designed a few smaller buildings in a traditional style before finding his own voice.
His breakthrough came with the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, 1893–1894, a town house for a professor. There the iron structure was left visible indoors, and columns, railings, floor mosaics and murals were shaped like winding plants in a continuous space. It is counted among the first Art Nouveau houses. He went on to design the Hôtel Solvay, the Hôtel van Eetvelde and his own house and studio, today the Horta Museum, where he designed everything from the floor plan to the door handles. The Maison du Peuple, a people’s house for the Belgian Workers’ Party, had a façade of iron and glass. Later he turned to a more austere classicism, for example in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
Horta was ennobled as a baron in 1932 and died in 1947. His Art Nouveau inspired architects all over Europe, among them Hector Guimard in Paris. The demolition of the Maison du Peuple in 1965 provoked international protests and became a turning point for the preservation of architecture from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Four of his town houses in Brussels were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000. In Sweden Art Nouveau is usually called jugend, and the Swedish variant drew more on Germany and Vienna than on Brussels, but Horta’s idea of a coherent whole in which structure, ornament and furnishings are designed together was also found among Swedish Art Nouveau architects such as Lilljekvist.