Art Nouveau in Brussels often misses the attention that’s lavished on Gaudi in Barcelona, Guimard in Paris or Wagner in Vienna, but a case could easily be made for Belgium’s Victor Horta as one of the greatest, and certainly one of the very first—his Hôtel Tassel, built in 1892 is often described as the first Art Nouveau house.
One of Horta’s gems is the home and studio he built for himself in 1898; they’re now a museum owned by the Brussels municipality of St Gilles, which saved them from destruction in a period when Art Nouveau was out of style.
The office and studio, the right-hand building, is almost a factory for architecture. Horta employed a staff of artists, designers, architects and draftsmen to turn his ideas into two- and three-dimensional form. In the basement, a team of sculptors used the drawings to produce architectural sculpture for his projects.
Sadly, while visitors can walk through almost all of the site, no interior photographs are allowed, ostensibly to protect delicate materials—but given that none of the city’s other important Art Nouveau buildings has such a restriction, it seems questionable.
For that reason, unfortunately, I’ve been forced to rely on scanning a series of six postcards on sale at the site.
Such beautiful designs!