Discovering The Origins of Art Nouveau Architecture | HENI Talks

In the late 19th century, Brussels was a site of incredible expansion. At that time, a very particular way of building houses for the upper middle classes arose. And it's in this environment that a new generation of architects came to the fore and developed a style that became known as Art Nouveau. We generally think that the style that became known as Art Nouveau began in the city of Brussels. And we would say there are very particular reasons why that happened. That city was growing at a tremendous rate. It more or less tripled in size in the last two decades of the 19th century and it gave enormous opportunities to young architects. The Tasselhaus by architect Victor Horta, we might say, is the very first complete expression of modern architecture in the proper sense. And it's certainly the first building completely in the Art Nouveau style. As we stand in front of this building and look up at it, we realise that there is something quite extraordinary going on. First of all, we can see columns and we can see all the elements of classical architecture, but all of it has been deliberately changed, if not subverted perhaps. The tops and the bottoms are melted away with natural forms, with leaves. They look as though they're organically growing. There's a riveted iron beam straight across the front of the building, celebrating industry and celebrating technology. The building itself as well. The stone looks like it's being stretched like a skin. It's as though the central core of the building is pushing out. So the building, in a way, is an essay in nature, in technology and about the things that we should be thinking about in the late 19th century. As we go inside this building, we enter into an extraordinary space. So as radical as the facade outside is, we realise we really are in the presence of something different and something new. Not just Art Nouveau's style, which exploded around Europe in the next five years, but also as the origins of modernism proper. Virtually every modern style roots in architecture and design, root back to these years, and we see no more important interior than this one that we're studying. For example, all of the art's been brought together into an orchestration. In some ways, the young Victor Horta was an orchestrator, a person who put together different skills and trades to create a single complete interior. Metal, ceramic, mosaic, paper, wall decoration, and so on. The bringing together of two-dimensional art and three-dimensional art. We'd had a revolution in the graphic arts and in the world of painting, and this had changed the way that we saw the world. Very interestingly, the architects picked up on this and in a way brought everything together. What became known as Art Nouveau line, this swirling, curling approach to the flat surface, brings together the grand graphic arts, the fine arts, with architecture to create these interior spaces. Art Nouveau line was probably the single most important development stylistically of the entire style, and it dominated the next 10 years of modern architecture and design. We might say that this small interior space was the beginning of a radical departure for the visual arts and a revolution in architecture. It began with the young Belgian architect Victor Horta. Who was this young architect who was barely into his 30s when he embarked on creating a series of buildings which changed the shape of European architecture? He was born in Ghent in 1861 and he trained quite classically in Brussels, and would have been a mainstream classical architect, one thinks, had he just gone down normal routes. Early in his career, however, he worked in a range of new technologies to do with greenhouses and so forth. So he developed an interest in glass and iron, so that when he actually embarked on creating houses in the early 1890s, he was determined to bring these new technologies to play. Two years after the Tasselhaus, the Van Eetveldt house carries the great themes further forward. Victor Horta had a sense of what he wanted people to feel when they came into his buildings. And the idea would be, coming off this urban industrial world, and you're suddenly surrounded by calm, relaxing, natural form, which psychologically will impact you. Probably the single most important theme in the whole of the Arnavaux style is nature. And more than anywhere else, the major theme of nature was developed in this city, Brussels, and in houses like this. Nature belongs to all of us, and we come from nature. So the idea of the new art, of Arnavaux, was to take architecture and make it generate a parallel to natural form. Horta would want you to be calm, would want you to think that you're in nature, that you're in a petrified forest, where the shapes and forms around you naturally empathise towards you. So it's one of the first great examples in the modern period of using aesthetics, using beauty in a utopian way, to try and improve people's quality of life. In 1895, Horta designed and built the Hotel Solvay, perhaps his single most dramatic house. We would say, as we stand in a space like this, is that just about every single intellectual element that was going to be modernism in the 20th century was invented here in the late 19th. Here it is. We have all of the arts brought together. We have beautiful open-plan spaces. We have a recognition that technology and hand skills are not contradictory. They work together. At the end of the 19th century, perhaps the most influential thinker of all was Richard Wagner, the musician, who put forward the idea of Gestankenswerk, total work of art, where all of the arts are brought together to create this giant, beautiful harmony. And as we look around this building, we can see masterworks in wood, in metal, a masterpiece of painting by Van Ryselberg. In the middle of all this wonderful opulence and this extraordinary skill level, we still have riveted beams. We still have a great symbol of late 19th century technology in a kind of unashamed recognition that what created all these things was industrial technology. In many respects, the highly decorated and ornamental aspect of this room can make us forget that this is one of the first great masterpieces of modernist architecture. These architects did not reject decoration and ornament, but they embraced every single last principle that the future modernists would embrace. So, the beginnings of modernism here in Brussels. In the middle of designing all these houses, Horta decided to create a home for himself in the new style. The idea of the total work of art, of nature, of the new technology, all of them came to play in the home that he created for himself, which is now the Horta Museum. One lovely feature of Horta's own house is the blur between the garden and the house itself. It's as though natural themes flow straight into the heart of the house itself. What we pick up very powerfully as we walk up the staircase is the light pouring down from above. Stained glass canopy puts light right into the very heart of the house and it carries down right through the various floors. It is in fact a feature of most of these houses, a priority for getting light into the spaces. As we walk around the rooms in Horta's home, we realise that the idea of the total work of art, of different modes of artistic practice being brought together and fused into a single space, is absolutely everywhere. They're all orchestrated to make each individual space a thing in itself. Somebody who has literally lived with Horta in some respects is Benjamin Zewstraassen, the director of the Victor Horta Museum. So Benjamin, for you, what makes Belgian Art Nouveau differentiate from other versions of Art Nouveau? I think that the main thing is about architecture. So this way of first wanting to make a new architecture and think about space first. Second thing is what Horta called the practical side, which is the same thing as function. And the third thing which makes it very different is that the ornamentation they were using. The generation of young architects came to the fore and developed this style led by Victor Horta. There was this idea for him of a total harmony and the idea also of mastering every moment of creation. But we very often forget that he had only one goal, which is to personalise architecture, which couldn't be related to any style, but which was in terms of architecture, very rationalist, and in terms of ornament and decoration, very personal. He and his generation clearly still believed in ornament and embellishing a building. It's even more than that. It's the very famous sentence of Viollet-le-Duc is that the ornament is like the skin and it should work in the building like a skin on the skeleton and the muscles. So you have many, many examples, for instance, on the facade of the Van Itwael house, where the ornament is linked with the structure. And when you are very often function, link even inside the ornament. So the ornament is never free, it's never plaqued. So the style transmits to Europe very quickly. In fact, it's the fastest moving style so far in the history of architecture, I think. It was everywhere within three years and people loved it and people love it still. Yes, but I think that they, or at least I hope, that they also connect with the space and the architecture. And something which annoys me a lot is that for the public and also for many people who are doing research, especially Sophanovo and Arta, you have either the one who are working on ornament or the one on architecture and they do not speak to each other. But you should always remember this sentence of Arta is that the science of building knowledge of material is the support of artistic expression and that the mastering of space without the colour, without texture, without all those things would be pointless. So they are bound together. Art Nouveau, as it progressed, slowly began to spread and to split into different components. Victor Horta himself moved on from Art Nouveau quite quickly in the early part of the 20th century, moved into a kind of Art Deco type classicism which characterised his style through to his death in 1947. By then he'd lived through two world wars and was widely recognised as being one of the founding fathers of modernism in architecture generally. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Art Nouveau was its sheer speed. It was invented in 1893 but by 1900 it was already all over Europe. It truly was the first modern style.