Victor Horta, Interior of the Tassel House, 1893
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IMAGE LIST | ACTIVITIES
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The Brussels townhouse that Victor Horta built for Émile Tassel is often called the first full expression of art nouveau. It was completed in 1893.
Tassel was a professor of geometry and a friend of the architect. A collector of Japanese prints and a music enthusiast, he entertained often. Like most of Horta's clients in the 1890s, he was also a member of a young, politically progressive middle class, eager to demonstrate its modernity.
Tassel's house illustrates many of the elements that went into making art nouveau: an alternate "take" on historical styles, an arts and crafts sensibility, and the modern materials of iron and glass. Horta himself did not see the building as a total break with the past. The stone exterior includes the consoles, moldings, and columns of classical architecture. But the columns are iron, not stone. The building had a smooth, fluid façade, unlike the carefully articulated planes of true classical buildings.
Walking inside, a visitor would sense a different mood: the delicacy and curving "femininity" of a rococo drawing room. Yet it was alloyed by modernity in the choice of materials and their interpretation as plant forms. From a calyxlike capital, the iron columns sprout slender iron strips to support the floor above. No attempt is made to disguise this material -- the rivets are clearly visible, decorative in their own right. They emphasize rather than conceal the structure. Yet Horta turned to wrought-iron craftsmen to fashion the industrially laminated material.
Horta's organization of interior space was innovative -- the slide shows the first-floor stair landing. Rooms were filled with natural light (from two light wells), and the floor plan had a fluid, asymmetrical flow. To achieve an integrated whole, Horta also insisted on designing all elements of the interior decoration: the stair rail and painted wall decoration, the mosaic flooring, electric light fixtures, even the door handle are elements of a total design. Such a complete visual environment, or Gesamtkunstwerk, was thoroughly modern in its desire to place modern man in a fully modern setting.
Learning Activities
Art
• Discuss materials an architect would choose today to express his or her modernness. Collect images and research the materials of the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
• Compare the decoration in your own house. Does it have a similar Gesamtkunstwerk?
Humanities
• The Tassel House is now an embassy, and Horta's own residence is a museum. Discuss the appropriate use (public or private) or such historic structures.
• Discuss which contemporary structures in your town will likely merit historic preservation in the future.