Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (Bozar)

As early as 1913, the royal couple, Albert I and Elisabeth, let the mayor of Brussels, Adolphe Max, know that they wished to see a temple to music and the visual arts built. The city architect, François Malfait, submitted a plan with eighteenth-century-style façades in July 1914; the project was abandoned when war broke out.

With peace restored, the Minister of Public Works, Édouard Anseele, chose Victor Horta in 1919. Between 1919 and 1922 Horta drew five versions of his plan. The Senate set his project aside in 1920 for budgetary reasons. In 1922, on the initiative of Adolphe Max and the banker Henry Le Bœuf, a non-profit association, the Société du Palais des Beaux-Arts, was formed to build and then run the Palace with the State and the City: the City supplied the land and the State issued the loan. Max chaired its board and Le Bœuf served as managing director. Le Bœuf had been involved in the design since November 1921, and the final plans were completed in August 1922.

Building, under the contractor Armand Blaton, began in February 1923. Sandy, waterlogged ground, the mass of earth to be cleared, sewers wrongly reported as disused, the risk of neighbouring structures collapsing, strikes and shaky finances all slowed the work. The exhibition rooms and the chamber-music hall were inaugurated on 4 May 1928, the great concert hall on 19 October 1929.

Other architects later altered several rooms. From 1962 to 1967 C. Brodzki and C. Hannoset fully refitted the Decorative Art room to house the Film Museum. From 1969 to 1971 Lucien Baucher turned the sculpture hall into an animation hall with a removable metal podium; it recovered its original form in 1995-1996, for Europalia Horta. The great concert hall was refitted in 1976 by E. de Felici and R. Delers, and the chamber-music hall was radically transformed in 1987-1988 by the office of H. Gilson.

In the great hall, a fire in 1967 led to the wooden stage, which Horta had conceived as a sounding board, being replaced by a concrete one; restorations carried out from the 1990s to 2017 removed the concrete stage and replaced the carpet with a wooden floor. The 1967 fire also damaged the organ, completed in 1930, which stayed silent until its reconstruction was finished in 2017. In January 2021 a fire damaged part of the roof. In 2025 the artist Michel François, the architecture firm Giusto Van Campenhout and the designer Flore Fockedey redesigned the Horta Hall. The Palace has been listed since 19 April 1977.

Here Horta sets aside the curved line of Art Nouveau for a rather geometric vocabulary. The site, on the Coudenberg hill, came with two easements. The first forbade blocking the view that had been enjoyed from the Royal Palace over the lower town, so the height was cut and the building sank deeper into the ground. The second called for shops along the rue Ravenstein, sixteen of them in exchange for the plot ceded by the City. The shape of the site and the height limit allowed neither a symmetrical plan nor a monumental façade, and Horta himself rejected the word "palace" for a building whose main façade includes shops.

The complex rises through three levels, each opening onto a street. The lowest, largely underground, has its service entrance on the rue Terarken. The main entrance and its vestibule are on the middle level, on the rue Ravenstein, from where one reaches the concert hall and the sculpture hall. The upper level opens onto the rue Royale. The reinforced-concrete frame, infilled with brick, stands on concrete piles tied together by a network of footings and carries glazed steel roof structures.

The sculpture hall, now the Horta Hall, is a 700 m² hall of five aisles and two levels, paved in marble and covered by a glazed vault on a concrete frame. A red marble staircase connects it to the exhibition rooms on the upper level: sixteen rooms, partly grouped around the voids of the hall and of the great concert hall, which interconnect and can be closed off with sliding doors. Their glass ceiling allows overhead lighting of the works, now often set aside in favour of artificial light, which was provided from the outset for evening openings.

The great concert hall, egg-shaped, takes up the full height of the southern half of the building, ringed by ramps. Horta alone drew its plan, but it had to satisfy several wishes: the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe wanted the performers to feel surrounded by the audience, and Henry Le Bœuf corresponded at length with the architect about the acoustics, the lighting and the comfort of the seats. The roof structure, first planned in steel, was changed during construction to concrete on the advice of the contractor Blaton; this reinforced concrete, cheap and quick to deliver, led Horta to the egg shape. The vaulted ceiling, with three successive recesses, rests on two series of five transverse beams on columns, its central part glazed and pierced. Horta revived an old tradition by placing the royal box on the axis of the hall; the Royal Salon, with its polished marble and bright red stained glass, opens onto it. Opposite the box, Horta wanted to set the organ within the oval of the hall; the instrument built by Joseph Stevens, an organ builder from Duffel, departed markedly from that wish. The organ case is inspired by a drawing by Horta.

The bent façade, in large-block blue stone, has a corner rotunda at its centre and, at the right-hand end, a square corner tower that houses the King's Entrance. Its decoration is geometric, built on symmetrical schemes, with marbled glass and stained glass. On the rue Terarken side, the brick and blue stone façade is matched to the Hôtel de Ravenstein opposite. Inside, the walls are smooth stucco, the woodwork uniform and the floors marble or herringbone parquet; the original colours have been lost under successive refreshes. A monumental rotunda, first conceived as a tea room, is lined with columns, with curved staircases on either side of the entrance, an imposing ceiling and a chandelier.

Bozar, which occupies the Palace, brings together the visual arts, music, cinema, performance and debate there. Exhibitions fill the rooms of the upper level. The great concert hall, named the Henry Le Bœuf Hall, hosts concerts and the final of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium. The Horta Hall serves as the Palace's public square: receptions, fairs, banquets, openings, performances and concerts follow one another there, and it has housed a café since its 2025 redesign.

Exhibitions open from Tuesday to Sunday; concerts, films and debates each have their own times. The Horta Hall, on the ground floor, is freely accessible.

The steeply sloping site and the many stairwells can make parts of the building hard to reach for people with reduced mobility: Bozar asks visitors to announce their coming in advance, or to report on arrival to the ticket office or the information desk in the vestibule.

The Palace is at 23 rue Ravenstein, five minutes' walk from Brussels Central Station; the Gare Centrale and Parc metro stations are nearby.