Art Nouveau is born in Brussels
Victor Horta builds the Hôtel Tassel, where the iron winds like plants through the stair hall and everything is designed as a whole.
Art Nouveau was the first attempt to create an entirely new style, without models in history.
At the end of the 19th century Belgium was one of the most industrialised countries in the world, and Brussels had a wealthy bourgeoisie with liberal and artistic interests. The artists’ group Les XX showed the European avant-garde of the day there. Victor Horta was born in Ghent in 1861 and had worked for the architect Alphonse Balat, who had built the royal greenhouses of iron and glass at Laeken. The client, Émile Tassel, was a professor of geometry and unmarried, and he needed a house for living, working and entertaining. The plot was narrow and lay in a street of terraced houses, typical of Brussels, which made the task a problem of light and sequence of rooms.
The house was built in 1892–1893. Horta abandoned the usual plan with rooms in a row and instead placed an octagonal hall with a staircase at the centre of the house, where light falls through a glass roof. There stands an iron column that branches out like a stem, and the lines continue in the mosaic on the floor and in the paintings on the walls. The floors are staggered in split levels, so that the rooms flow into one another. The iron is shown openly, even on the façade, where a bay window of stone and iron breaks the line of the terrace. Horta designed everything, from door handles and lamps to glass and furniture, and the house had modern central heating and ventilation. The curving whiplash line became the hallmark of the style.
The Hôtel Tassel attracted great attention, and Horta quickly received new commissions: the Hôtel Solvay, the Hôtel van Eetvelde, his own house and the Maison du Peuple for the Belgian Workers’ Party, which was demolished in the 1960s despite international protests. His major town houses became a World Heritage Site in 2000. The Frenchman Hector Guimard visited Horta, and his entrances to the Paris Métro became Art Nouveau’s best-known public works. The style was given different names in different countries, such as Jugendstil in Germany and Secession in Vienna. In Sweden it was called jugend and can be seen in Stockholm’s façades around 1900, in the work of architects such as Ferdinand Boberg. But the style was short-lived, and by around 1910 architects were already heading in other directions.