Victor Horta

Victor Horta was born in Ghent on 6 January 1861, the son of a shoemaker. He attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts of his home city from 1874 to 1877, then left for Paris in 1878, where a decorative architect hired him. When his father died in 1880 he returned to Ghent, married a childhood friend, Pauline Heyse, and the couple settled in Brussels. Horta resumed his studies at the Academy and joined the office of Alphonse Balat, who received major commissions from King Leopold II, among them the Laeken greenhouses; he would feel a genuine veneration for this master all his life. With their new materials and decorative motifs, Balat's greenhouses already opened the way to the Art Nouveau that Horta, his apprentice, would develop. In 1884 he won the first architecture prize of the Godecharle Foundation, which enabled him to travel in France and Germany, and in 1887 the first prize of the triennial competition of the Royal Academy in Brussels.

His career truly began in 1893 with two houses commissioned by friends from the Amis Philanthropes lodge, among them Émile Tassel, who taught descriptive geometry at the Free University of Brussels. At the Hôtel Tassel he gave up the three rooms in a row of the traditional Brussels house: he hollowed out the centre of the building to let daylight in, left an iron structure exposed, integrated the decoration into it and created a greenhouse at the heart of the house. Belgian Art Nouveau is said to be born in Brussels in 1893, with this house and Paul Hankar's. Following Viollet-le-Duc's principles, Horta used iron, cast iron and glass in a form freed from the styles of the past, and sought an ornament that supports the structure without hiding it; his "whiplash" curve became the motif of his decoration, but space and light mattered above all, and the stairwell often serves as a light well. At the Hôtel Solvay, designed from 1894 for Armand Solvay with an almost unlimited budget, then at the Hôtel van Eetvelde (1895), the winter garden is no longer a room tacked on at the back of the house: it is built into the dwelling. The Belgian Workers' Party also commissioned a Maison du Peuple from him, in iron and glass; according to his Memoirs, Horta wanted to build there "a palace that would not be a palace", a house where air and light would offer the luxury so long denied to workers' slums. Despite strong international protests, it was demolished in 1965. His own house and studio, designed in 1898-1901, became the Horta Museum in 1969.

Mediocre imitations of his style drove away the private clientele, who valued exclusivity, all the more as shopkeepers commissioned stores from him; at the Waucquez (1906) and Wolfers (1909) stores, the façade no longer displays any metal structure. At the Hôtel Max Hallet, a client's wish to grow flowers still led him to graft a three-apsed greenhouse onto the rear façade. He then sought large public commissions, which in his view would anchor his work more lastingly: the Museum of Fine Arts in Tournai, commissioned in 1903 and opened in 1928, whose glazed galleries surround a central hall for optimal light and supervision; the Brugmann Hospital, won in 1906 and laid out in pavilions after a study trip across Europe; the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, designed from 1919 and built from 1923 to 1929, which blends Art Deco forms with a system of classical proportions; and the Central Station, commissioned in 1910 and opened in 1952, after his death. Horta himself divided his career into two parts, first private commissions, then major official ones, yet his mastery of space, circulation and light remains intact from one to the other. Exiled against his will in the United States from 1915 to 1919, made a baron in 1932, he was bitter when he began writing his Memoirs in 1939, because of the rejection of Art Nouveau. He died in Brussels on 8 September 1947.

The neglect of Art Nouveau and the pressure of property development threatened his buildings: from the 1950s the architect Jean Delhaye tried to persuade the public authorities to save the master's masterpieces. He bought the Hôtel Tassel himself in 1976, the year it was listed as a monument, and began its restoration in 1982. Since 2000 four of Horta's Brussels houses, the Hôtels Tassel, Solvay and van Eetvelde and his own house and studio, have been on the UNESCO World Heritage List.