Art Nouveau in architecture – how to recognise it

Art Nouveau, in Swedish jugend, is a style in architecture and design from around 1890 to 1910. Its buildings are recognised by undulating lines, plant and animal motifs, asymmetry and free forms in iron, glass, ceramics and stone. The style wanted to break with Historicism's copies of old styles and create something new.

Facts

A new style with many names

The style had different names in different countries. Art Nouveau comes from the art dealer Siegfried Bing's shop Maison de l'Art Nouveau in Paris, opened in 1895. Jugendstil comes from the German magazine Jugend, first published in 1896. In Vienna it was called Secession, in Catalonia Modernisme and in Italy stile Liberty, after a department store in London.

Behind all the names lay the same ambition: to stop copying Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque and instead create a modern style from the forms of nature and the new materials. Often the ambition was a total work of art, where the architect designed everything from the façade to the door handles. Read about the style on the page on Art Nouveau.

Brussels and Paris

Victor Horta built the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels in 1893, and it is considered the first Art Nouveau building. In the stair hall the iron columns become stems that burst into tendrils, and the same whiplash lines, long undulating curves, recur in the floor mosaic and the wall paintings. Horta's own house is now a museum.

In Paris Hector Guimard designed the entrances to the Métro around 1900 in cast iron and glass, shaped like plants. Art Nouveau was a style for modern city life: department stores, cafés, theatres and apartment buildings.

Barcelona and Gaudí

In Barcelona the style took its most imaginative form. Antoni Gaudí built Casa Batlló in 1904–1906 with a façade shimmering with ceramic fragments and balconies that look like masks, and Casa Milà, La Pedrera, with an undulating stone façade without a single straight line.

Gaudí worked on the Sagrada Família from 1883 until his death in 1926, and the church is still being built. Lluís Domènech i Montaner created the concert hall Palau de la Música Catalana, where the ceiling is a large, coloured glass skylight.

Glasgow and Vienna: a more austere Art Nouveau

Not all Art Nouveau architects loved curves. In Glasgow Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed the Glasgow School of Art and the Hill House with tall, straight lines, grid patterns and only the occasional stylised rose. He became a model in Vienna.

There, in 1897, a group of artists and architects broke away from the established artists' association and formed the Secession. Joseph Maria Olbrich designed the Secession Building with a dome of gilded laurel leaves and the motto “To every age its art, to art its freedom”. Otto Wagner clad the Majolica House in tiles with flower patterns and built the Postal Savings Bank, where the style already points towards modernism.

Art Nouveau in Sweden

In Sweden the best-known example is the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, designed by Fredrik Lilljekvist and opened in 1908, with gilded details, sculptures and a splendid foyer. Many apartment buildings in the large cities were built with Art Nouveau doorways, undulating bay windows and decoration of flowers and tendrils.

Swedish Art Nouveau often merges into National Romanticism, with heavier materials such as granite and brick. Read more in the guide to National Romanticism. To see the same style in furniture, glass and jewellery, read the guide to Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

How to recognise it

Exercise

In which city is the Hôtel Tassel, often called the first Art Nouveau building?