Victor Horta was the leading European architect of the movement to create a modern architecture in the 1890s. His work blended structural rationalism influenced by the writings of E.E. Viollet-le-Duc with personal, curvilinear decoration derived from abstracted botanic forms as proposed by V.-M.-C. Ruprich-Robert to produce works of astounding internal spatial complexity and organic completeness. Horta’s buildings were complete works of art for which, when given the opportunity, he designed every object, from furniture and table linens to doorknobs and andirons. Often remembered as one of the practitioners of the Art Nouveau style, Horta was, in fact, the chief inventor of that style. More than that, his ability to use iron and glass in place of load-bearing masonry remained unsurpassed among turn-of-the-century architects.

Born in Ghent in 1861, Horta briefly studied music at the local conservatory before enrolling in the architecture course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. In 1878, he traveled to Paris to work for an interior decorator, returning to Ghent on his father's death in 1880. The following year, he married, moved to Brussels, undertook the study of architecture at the Brussels academy, and began drafting for Alphonse Balat, the royal architect to King Leopold II, whose work reflected a rational, if classical, approach to architecture. Horta worked intermittently for Balat until 1891.

In Paris in the late 1870s, Horta discovered the power of Beaux-Arts design, as exemplified by both the urban planning of Baron Haussmann’s boulevards and the architecture of Charles Garnier’s opera house. Returning in 1889 for the world’s fair, he was similarly drawn to the Galerie des Machines, an iron-and-glass building whose trusses spanned almost 400 feet. He was amazed not only by the possibilities of Victor Contamin’s engineering but also by the curvilinear decoration created by the architect Charles Dutert.

Horta’s pavilion for Jef Lambeaux’s “Passions Humaines,” begun in 1889, reveals a search for a new expression within the vocabulary of classicism. In the Autriche house (1893), Horta first explored a more original decorative vocabulary based on abstracted botanic forms and simple geometry. Yet neither prepares us for the extraordinary accomplishment of his next building, the Tassel house (1893). Within the parameters of the standard Brussels townhouse—party walls with its neighbors on the sides, built to the street, and with an open yard behind—Horta began an architectural revolution. He split the building into two parts and connected them with a metal-and-glass circulation zone that brought natural light into the whole building. He set the whole composition in motion by melding his new curvilinear decoration with the structural systems. Horta developed this solution into its most elaborate form in the Solvay house (1894) and into its most perfect form in the Van Eetvelde house (1895).

Horta brought this approach to nondomestic architecture in 1895 at La Maison du Peuple, the Brussels headquarters of the Belgian Workers Party, which contained large and small lecture halls, meeting rooms, a coffee house, and commercial shops. He combined structural iron freely exposed in a “rational” manner with sinuous curves of iron, wood, and masonry to produce a work of great expressive power that is clearly organized.

Horta’s mature style was perfectly tuned to the values of the haute bourgeoisie of the 1890s throughout Europe. His architecture strongly influenced emerging architects, such as Hector Guimard, whereas the superficial aspects of his decorative forms were easily copied by lesser designers. Horta’s very popularity contributed to a rapid change of taste in the middle of the first decade that left him without sufficient clients to continue investigating the problems posed in the 1890s. His work gradually became simpler in form and reflected a return to classicism.

Horta was deeply affected by the German occupation of Belgium. In February 1915, he traveled to London to meet with British architects and Belgians in exile to plan the rebuilding of Belgium after the war. In December, he continued to New York to enlist the support of American architects. The proposed lecture tour became a three-year exile. Returning home in 1919, Horta was overwhelmed by the devastation.

Respected in Belgium as both a master architect and teacher, Horta in the 1920s was involved in a number of civic projects, including a new gallery and concert hall, the central train station, a major public hospital, and the Belgian Pavilion at the 1925 Paris World’s Fair. All these were expressed in an abstracted classical manner. The rebuke of this work by early historians of the Modern movement has been reversed by a recent generation of historians, who find continuity in approach despite a change of style. The concert hall, Le Palais des Beaux-Arts (1920), built of reinforced concrete, has come to be regarded as Horta’s most accomplished work. Although the massing of rectilinear solids that characterizes this building has more in common with Art Deco than with the emerging International Style, the design exhibits the same expressive rationalism of Horta’s earlier work. Horta’s work stands as an early expression of the possibility of incorporating the cataclysmic changes brought about by the industrial revolution into a system of design that, like the great historic styles of the past, reflects contemporary values and possibilities.

Paut Kruty

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.