Hôtel Tassel
A town house for a professor, and the first Art Nouveau building. Horta left the iron exposed and bent it like plants, and the stair hall is painted with tendrils that continue in the mosaic floor and the wrought-iron balustrades. Everything in the house is part of the same movement.
Victor Horta received the commission from Émile Tassel, professor of geometry at the Free University of Brussels and a friend of the architect. The house was designed in 1892 and built around 1893–1894 on a narrow, deep plot in Brussels. Horta was tired of architects merely repeating historical styles and wanted to create a new world of forms based on nature and the new materials. Iron and glass had until then been used mainly in stations and market halls, but here they were given a prominent place in an elegant private house for the first time. The structure was openly displayed, and load-bearing columns and beams were shaped to resemble stems and tendrils. The client was a bachelor who held parties and lectures in the house, which influenced the arrangement of the rooms.
What is unusual about the plan is that the house consists of two parts, one facing the street and one facing the garden, linked by a stair hall in the middle. The stair hall is lit by a glass roof and brings light to the rooms deep inside the narrow house. Here stands a free-standing iron column whose capital dissolves into tendrils, and the same movement continues in the wall paintings, the mosaic floor and the wrought-iron balustrades. Split levels offset from one another make the rooms flow into each other instead of lying in a straight sequence. The façade is of stone with a curved bay window in the centre, where the iron beams are visible. Horta also designed doors, handles, lamps and furniture, so that everything belonged together.
After Tassel’s time the house was divided up and used as flats and offices, and many details were lost or concealed. Towards the end of the 20th century it was restored and regained much of its original form. In 2000, together with three other town houses by Horta in Brussels, it became a World Heritage Site. The Hôtel Tassel is regarded as the breakthrough of Art Nouveau, and the style spread rapidly across Europe under names such as Jugendstil, Secession style and Modernisme. Horta’s way of turning the load-bearing iron into ornament influenced architects from Paris to Riga. In Sweden Art Nouveau arrived a few years later, and its softly curving lines can be seen, for example, in the work of Ferdinand Boberg and in the stairwells and entrances of many city blocks built around 1900.