The two preceding chapters, in entering the nineties, crossed what is perhaps the major historical frontier within the century and a half covered by this book. The skyscrapers of Sullivan and the early houses of Wright and Voysey—despite Voysey’s own disavowal of modernism—are among the first major manifestations of the period of architectural history that extends down to and includes our own time. The contemporaries of these men who were the new leaders on the Continent in the nineties had as sharp a sense of the novelty of the innovations they were making as did Sullivan or Wright, and the most characteristic stylistic formulation of this decade in Europe was appropriately known from an early date^[356] as ‘Art Nouveau’. Before discussing the Art Nouveau itself, two related developments that precede it must be considered at least briefly. In France, various feats of metal construction of the sixties, seventies, and eighties had prepared the way for the Art Nouveau on the technical side, and these have, moreover, considerable intrinsic interest in their own right. English innovations in decorative art of the eighties and nineties are accepted by most historians as providing one of the most important immediate sources of the Art Nouveau,^[357] and English architecture and architectural theory of the later decades of the nineteenth century certainly offered a generic stimulus to Europeans between 1890 and 1910 that was of vital consequence to subsequent developments.

By the early nineties advanced English work began to be widely known on the Continent. In 1888 the German architect Alexander Koch (1848-1911) started to publish annually his Academy Architecture bringing current English production, and many significant projects also, to the attention of designers abroad. L’Architecture moderne en Angleterre by the French architect Paul Sédille (1836-1900) appeared in Paris in 1890. The architect Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927), who was stationed at the German Embassy in London from 1896 to 1903 primarily to study low-cost housing, issued two folio volumes devoted to Die englische Baukunst der Gegenwart in 1900-2, another on Die neuere kirchliche Baukunst in England in 1902 and, in 1904-5, three thick quarto volumes on Das englische Haus. These richly illustrated books made much of the story of the development of English architecture in the second half of the century available in German long before it was pieced together by the English (see Chapters 12 and 15).

Voysey never worked abroad; but his houses, known internationally from an early date thanks to their publication in the Studio, an English periodical founded in 1893, were soon much studied on the Continent, and to a lesser extent in America. Voysey’s contemporaries Baillie Scott and Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), however, both received foreign commissions as early as 1898; in fact, Mackintosh and his highly original ideas—he was no Voyseyan ‘reformer’ but a very bold innovator—received more support abroad than at home and were much more influential on the Continent than in Great Britain.

Historians of modern architecture have generally emphasized, and rightly, the special importance of the advances in metal construction^[358] that were made in France in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The great name of the period is not that of an architect but of an engineer, Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923). At the International Exhibition of 1855 in Paris and again at the World’s Fair of 1893 in Chicago the vast metal-and-glass structures were masked externally by real or imitated masonry façades. Between these dates, however, came a series of French exhibition buildings that were increasingly bold in scale and frank in design; with the construction of most of them Eiffel was directly concerned. Yet his bridge over the Douro at Oporto in Portugal of 1876-7 quite overshadowed the Galerie des Machines that he and Krantz built for the Paris Exhibition of 1867, as his later Pont de Garabit of 1880-4 outclassed the pavilion that he designed for the Exhibition of 1878 and that portion of the Bon Marché Department Store on which he collaborated in 1876 with the younger Boileau. In the exhibition buildings the metalwork was completely exposed and in that of 1878^[359] a serious attempt was made to develop appropriate embellishments, quite as Wyatt had done for Brunel at Paddington Station in London twenty-five years earlier. The rather tawdry result helps to explain why innovations in architectural design had so little public support in France in this period—a period, of course, when the bold innovations of the Impressionists were revolutionizing another art in Paris.

Beside Eiffel’s gallery, the Anglo-Japanese room^[360] which Whistler and Godwin showed at this same exhibition must have seemed infinitely sophisticated, and even the Late Stuart detailing of the cement-brick front of Shaw’s Jury House most agreeably urbane. Such things might well have turned the attention of foreign architects towards England earlier than was generally the case. Sédille, one of the less tradition-bound French professionals of this period, did visit England in the eighties, publishing his book on current English architecture, which has just been mentioned, ten years before Muthesius’s. His selections, however, were not very discriminating, nor is there evidence that he profited much from what he saw. The Printemps department store of 1881-9, designed of course well before his trip, certainly shows no English influence.

For the Paris Exhibition of 1889^[361] Eiffel early proposed and, in 1887, was commissioned to build the tremendous all-metal tower^[362] which still dominates Paris (Plate 130A). As has been noted, this 984-foot edifice was, down to the erection of the Empire State Building in New York by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon more than forty years later, the tallest structure in the world. The Eiffel Tower, which appropriately carries its designer’s name, is no more a building in the ordinary sense than are his great bridges, however. Although scraping so much higher skies than did Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building in Chicago, which was erected in precisely the same years, the Paris tower was far less significant either technically or functionally. Except the painter Seurat, most contemporaries disliked it, considering it a monstrous blemish on the Parisian skyline; today of course, it is rightly deemed a nineteenth-century masterpiece, but a masterpiece of engineering rather than of architecture.

As with Eiffel’s pavilion at the Exhibition of 1878, there is considerable ambiguity in the design of the Eiffel Tower. Seen from a distance its four legs have much of the vigorous spring of his bridges and the tapered shaft of criss-crossed metalwork seems—but in fact is not—an almost inevitable expression of large-scale construction in metal. Seen from nearer to, however, the arbitrarily arched forms that link the legs are very conspicuous and also the coarse ornamentation of curvilinear strapwork—recalling a little Wyatt’s at Paddington Station of nearly forty years before, but much less just in scale—with which the basic forms are bedecked. The close similarity of this mixture of frank construction and applied decoration to the Art Nouveau approach to the design of metal structures will shortly become evident. Over-impressed, perhaps, by the more functional engineering feat of construction at the 1889 Exhibition provided by the wide-spanned metal-and-glass Palais des Machines of the engineers Contamin (1840-93), Pierron, and Charton—in which the contribution of the associated architect C.-L.-F. Dutert (1845-1906) was relatively unimportant—certain later critics have preferred that structure to the Eiffel Tower. Yet it is the tower which clearly has more of the magnificence of Eiffel’s bridges despite its irrelevant and (from a distance) almost invisible ornamentation. The tower, moreover, is premonitory of the Art Nouveau; the Galerie des Machines rather of later modern architecture (see Chapters 20 and 22).

One other line of innovation in France in these decades deserves mention. In 1871 Jules Saulnier built a factory for Chocolat Menier near Paris at Noisiel, S.-et-M., with an exposed metal skeleton. The iron frame consists of diagonally set members rather similar to the late medieval timber-framing of France, and the infilling of the panels is of varicoloured bricks and tiles. This structure attracted the attention of Viollet-le-Duc, who saw in it a realization of certain of his theoretical ambitions for nineteenth-century architecture. He not only mentioned it very favourably in the second volume of his Entretiens, which appeared in 1872, but in several illustrations suggested similar and variant combinations of iron and masonry. In a colour plate, for example, he showed a striking urban façade with its visible iron framework filled with brilliantly coloured glazed tiles. By the nineties quite a few buildings in France had exploited very successfully this structural system;^[363] it is perhaps more important, however, that Viollet-le-Duc’s text and illustrations made the idea familiar internationally.

When one learns that Horta or Gaudí or various Americans ‘read Viollet-le-Duc’ in the seventies and eighties one must assume that the Entretiens, of which the first volume appeared in 1863, is meant—and perhaps even more specifically the second volume of 1872 with its accompanying set of plates. These last could be ‘read’ by architects to particularly good purpose. The Entretiens were available to most Europeans in the original language and to the English and the Americans in translation.^[364]

The characteristic employment of metal by Art Nouveau architects in the nineties and the first decade of this century undoubtedly owed a great deal both to the inspiration of Eiffel’s large engineering structures, culminating in his tower of 1887-9, and to the vigorous critical support of Saulnier’s ideas which Viollet-le-Duc provided, not to speak of the projects of his own that he published in 1872. The knot is tied tighter—although with a different sort of structural development—when one notes that de Baudot, of all French architects most particularly the disciple and heir of Viollet-le-Duc as well as a former pupil of Henri Labrouste, was the first to exploit ferro-concrete architecturally and not merely technically (see Chapter 18). Moreover, he employed as his contractor to construct his epoch-making concrete church of St Jean de Montmartre in Paris of the nineties (see Chapter 17), Contamin, one of the engineers responsible for the Galerie des Machines at the Exhibition of 1889. But the European Art Nouveau was even less a matter of structural innovation, pure and simple, than Sullivan’s contemporary skyscrapers in America (see Chapter 14).

This brief and curious episode in the history of art,^[365] starting in the early nineties and subsiding little more than a decade later, has always been called in English by a French name, perhaps because it never became acclimatized in England but was always considered a dubious import from Belgium and France. Despite the diffidence of the English—which Americans fully shared—the Art Nouveau was an international mode. It was as frequently called in France by the English name ‘Modern Style’, while to the Germans it was ‘Jugendstil’ and to the Italians ‘stile Liberty’. The German term comes from the magazine Jugend, whose illustrations and typography were fairly consistently in the new mode; the Italian from Liberty’s, the shop in London whose orientalizing fabrics became widely popular at this time (but with overtones from the obvious pun involved). In Italian it is also, and much more descriptively, the ‘stile floreale’.

The Art Nouveau is not primarily an architectural mode. Many of the finest and boldest of the large edifices built between 1890 and 1910, however, beginning with Sullivan’s skyscrapers, are certainly related to its ethos; and the Art Nouveau leaders produced quite a few buildings of real distinction that can be defined by no other term. Like the Rococo of the early and mid eighteenth century—which the Art Nouveau sometimes closely resembled and to whose revived forms it was often vulgarly assimilated—it was most successful as a mode of interior decoration. Generally linear rather than plastic,^[366] the Art Nouveau was also very closely associated with the graphic arts; indeed they provide many of the most characteristic examples, as well as the earliest items that can be considered possible prototypes.

How far back the ultimate sources of the Art Nouveau should be sought, and precisely where, continues to be a subject of active research. In the graphic arts there are certainly significant similarities to be noted in William Blake’s^[367] way of designing book pages. Through the Pre-Raphaelites, moreover, a line of descent from Blake can be traced down to the eighties and nineties when, indeed, his characteristic pages were sometimes reproduced in facsimile. But oriental,^[368] specifically Japanese, influence certainly played some part also in the gestation of the mode. There is early evidence of that influence on western architecture in the decorative work of Godwin and Nesfield in England, beginning already in the sixties, as also in the painting of the Impressionists in France (see Chapters 10 and 12). But the earliest designs that can be readily mistaken for Continental work of 1900 are certainly by the English architect-decorator Mackmurdo and date from just after 1880. Many of the textile and wallpaper patterns that Mackmurdo, Heywood Sumner (1853-1940), and others created for the Century Guild, founded in 1882, already have the characteristic semi-naturalistic^[369] forms, swaying lines, and asymmetrical organization of the mature decorative mode of the nineties. Even more striking is the design of Mackmurdo’s title-page of 1883 for his book on the London churches of Sir Christopher Wren^[370]—a curious conjunction, this, of two opposed stylistic developments of the eighties, the one towards the Baroque and the ‘Monumental Queen Anne’, the other towards a wholly novel mode of ornamentation.

English products, such as were shown by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from its foundation in 1888, soon reached the Continent. Moreover, even before the Studio began publication in 1893 Koch’s Academy Architecture (from 1888), which has already been mentioned, and (from 1890) his review Innendekoration, as well as less specialized English magazines such as (from 1884) Mackmurdo’s Hobby Horse and (from 1891) The Yellow Book, with its highly stylized and very curvilinear illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, were eagerly studied all over western Europe. The younger men were reading William Morris, too, and responding enthusiastically to his ethical and social demands for a reform of the household arts. At the same time the novel styles of the most advanced Post-Impressionist painters offered a powerful stimulus to architects.

This matter of the relationship between advanced painting and advanced architecture in the nineteenth century, a relationship destined to be of rather greater importance in the early twentieth, deserves some broader comment and recapitulation here. A hundred and fifty years before, when Romantic Classicism was being born in Rome, painters, sculptors, and architects shared common ideals and worked with a full understanding of each other’s problems (see Chapter 1). The backgrounds of David’s bas-relief-like early paintings show architecture in the most advanced taste of the day, and no more beautiful Romantic Classical furniture was actually produced than that which he invented for his Classical scenes and occasionally introduced in his modern portraits. The Classical sculptor Thorwaldsen at the Glyptothek in Munich and later at the Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen collaborated closely with the architects Klenze and Bindesbøll. Schinkel was himself a Romantic painter of some distinction before he matured as a Romantic Classical architect, and he collaborated later on the mural for the front of the Altes Museum with the painter Peter Cornelius, as did Klenze on the decorations of the Glyptothek in Munich.

With the gradual decline of Romantic Classicism architects and painters had more difficulty in developing parallel programmes; and the results of collaboration between them in the decoration of buildings were rarely as happy as the backgrounds the architects sometimes supplied to the painters. Ingres’s stained-glass windows of the forties in the Chapelle d’Orléans at Dreux and the Chapelle Saint-Ferdinand at Neuilly have been mentioned. More successful are the murals by Delacroix in Joly’s library at the Chambre des Deputés in Paris; but there is hardly that real visual harmony between picture and setting that the previous period had often achieved. However, the rising interest in architectural polychromy and the extension of the range of acceptable stylistic models to include the Early Renaissance and even the Middle Ages were both encouraged by the turn that the art of painting was beginning to take on the Continent around 1815. Hübsch, for example, was a sort of Nazarener among architects. Later Ingres was a close friend of Hittorff, even though he never collaborated with him to any good purpose (see Chapter 3), much less with Viollet-le-Duc, with whom he was also on good terms. The degree of stylization that Early Christian, Romanesque, or Gothic architectural modes properly demanded was not yet acceptable in figural art. Indeed, the rather quattrocento early pictures of Ingres were much too ‘Gothic’ for most of his contemporaries and are generally less esteemed than his more Classical work even today.

Above all, the ever-rising importance of landscape in the painting of all countries was necessarily without real parallels in architecture, except in so far as the increasing desire to open up houses towards the circumambient view reflects a similar preoccupation with the natural scene. As to Realism, the principal artistic movement of the mid century in French art, that could only be echoed in architectural theory. Impressionism may seem even more difficult to relate to architecture.^[371]

In England in the fifties, however, a loose alliance did exist between the new Pre-Raphaelite painters and some of the leading High Victorian Gothic architects, both supported for a time by the critic Ruskin. In the sixties and seventies Morris on the one hand, developing as a decorator out of the Pre-Raphaelite milieu of Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, and Whistler on the other hand, chiefly nurtured in the advanced artistic world of Paris but also influenced in England by Rossetti, collaborated closely with architects—Morris with Webb and with Bodley, Whistler with Godwin. As has been noted, the strikingly novel results of the latter collaboration were displayed in Paris in their Anglo-Japanese room at the Exhibition of 1878. Europeans became generally aware of Morris’s decorative work only somewhat later.

In France in these decades fewer painters than in England commissioned talented individualists of the order of Shaw or Webb or Godwin to build their houses.^[372] If they were Realists or Impressionists they could not have afforded to do so; if they were prosperous Academicians they would not have wished to. Even in England, Millais, after he became really successful, preferred to build a dull house in South Kensington of quite conventional character rather than to employ Shaw or Webb or Godwin.

In the eighties the most advanced European painters, not merely those of France but more generally, turned away from Realism and even from Impressionism in order to concern themselves more with pattern or with expression. The two French leaders of this reaction whose art seems to posterity most architectonic, Cézanne and Seurat, did not affect architecture or design at this time at all. Even Van Gogh and Gauguin, whose styles have a more decorative inflection, were less influential than such almost forgotten painters as the Dutch Toorop and the Belgian Khnopff, the better-known Belgian Ensor, or the Swiss Hodler and the Norwegian Munch, not to speak of the English Beardsley.

The general admiration in avant-garde circles for the work of these artists—with which went paradoxically a continuing and even growing estimation of the anti-architectonic pictures of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists both French and native—ran parallel everywhere with the rapid rise and spread of the Art Nouveau. In some sense, indeed, the Art Nouveau may be considered the equivalent as a mode of design of what is somewhat ambiguously called Impressionism in music—the work of Debussy, Delius, etc. Some of the chief critical supporters of the new painters in the nineties such as Julius Meier-Graefe were also active proponents of the Art Nouveau. Yet advanced painting, in fact, provided little more than a sympathetic atmosphere for the birth of the Art Nouveau, somewhat as the young painters and critics of the third quarter of the eighteenth century had done in Rome for the gestation of Romantic Classicism in architecture.

Why the Art Nouveau should have been initiated full-fledged by Victor Horta (1861-1947)^[373] in Brussels in 1892 remains a mystery. The rather similar stylistic crystallization in Sullivan’s architectural ornament, henceforth almost equally organic and sinuous in character, had begun several years earlier even before the interiors of the Auditorium were designed in 1887-8. These will hardly have been known in Belgium, for few foreigners were aware of Sullivan’s work at all until they came to Chicago to visit the World’s Fair in 1893. Illustrations of the remarkable ironwork on Gaudí’s Palau Güell in Barcelona are not likely to have reached Brussels either, though several of its interiors were published in The Decorator and Furnisher in New York in 1892. In any case Gaudí’s ultimate style was only beginning to take form in the early nineties. A certain amount of quite original decoration was being done in New York from the beginning of the eighties by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), but it is unlikely that it was known abroad. Tiffany’s ‘Favrile’ glass came a good deal later and is precisely contemporaneous with the Art Nouveau,^[374] of which it continued to be for a decade and more one of the most internationally distinguished products.

It is generally assumed that Horta knew the rather similar glass designed earlier by Émile Gallé (1846-1904) in France and that he already had some familiarity with the work of such painters as Ensor, Khnopff, and Toorop, if not with that of Hodler, Munch, or Beardsley. Yet such familiarity would hardly by itself have counter-balanced the academic training he received from his master and later employer Balat (see Chapter 9). This explains, however, the very Classical character of his Temple des Passions Humaines, erected in 1884 in the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. Horta did no building on his own between 1885 and 1892. Presumably, however, it was knowledge of the theories and the projects of Viollet-le-Duc acquired in those years that encouraged him to make frank and expressive use of iron in association with masonry when he really began to practise. Yet the influence of Viollet-le-Duc hardly provides an explanation for the specific character of his innovations in ornament or the consistency of style that he achieved almost at once.

Against such rather negative assumptions, a more positive one may be set. In the Tassel house in Brussels, completed in 1893, Horta’s first mature work, he introduced an English^[375] wallpaper between the exposed metal structural elements of the dining-room walls. It is highly likely, therefore, that the new English decorative products were already known to him the previous year^[376] when he designed and began this epoch-making house.

The Tassel house at 6 Rue Paul-Émile Janson, just off the Avenue Louise, initiated a new architectural mode as definitely as one modest terrace-house could possibly do. How long before 1892, when the Tassel house was begun, Horta may have been designing on paper in this way does not seem to be known. When one considers how important the innumerable projects of the second half of the eighteenth century are to our understanding of the architectural revolution that established Romantic Classicism as the successor to the Baroque, the absence of such clues concerning the gestation of the Art Nouveau is most exasperating; but considerable research by students of the period has so far brought little that seems relevant to light.

In plan there are no very great novelties in the Tassel house, although the interior partitions of the principal floor are bent to give varying shapes and sizes to symmetrically disposed spaces that open rather freely into one another. The major innovation lay in the frank expression of metal structure and in the characteristic decoration, particularly that of the stair-hall (Plate 130B). There at the foot of the stair an iron column rises free and svelte out of which iron bands branch at the top, like vines from the trunk of a sapling, to form brackets under the curved openwork beams of iron above. Other lighter and less structural bands interlace to form the stair-rail. The organic, swaying, and interweaving lines of the metalwork, both structural and decorative, were originally rather boldly echoed in purely ornamental curvilinear decoration painted on the walls, and they are still so echoed in the patterns of the extant floor mosaic.

These patterns in the stair-hall are each unique, not repeated like those on the English chintzes and wallpapers they so much resemble. The lines, whether moving freely in space like those of the ironwork, painted on the curved wall, or inlaid in the flat floor plane, all form part of complex organic motifs. The result is therefore more comparable to Mackmurdo’s title-page of 1883, or even to some of the repoussé brasswork on his furniture. (Like the very few buildings Mackmurdo designed, this furniture is quite rectilinear otherwise, it might be noted.) During the brief life of the Art Nouveau hardly even Horta himself, much less those who followed in his footsteps, achieved an ensemble more exemplary than this stair-hall. It is truly a work of interior architecture, not merely a matter of applied decoration as is most of the ornament used in association with the English wallpaper in the dining-room.

The façade of the house is much less striking than the interiors. However, the linear curves of the internal structural elements are reflected plastically, so to say, in the bowing forward of the entire central window area. This is so extensive as to approach, but not to equal, English window-walls of the preceding decades. In the upper storeys the lights in this broad bay-window are subdivided only by iron colonnette-mullions and topped with exposed iron beams. There is no archaeological reminiscence of any past style here; yet it must have been from local stucco-work of the Rococo period that Horta drew the inspiration for his carved stone detail. It certainly does not derive either from England or from Viollet-le-Duc. Horta was, and continued to be, much less happy in devising such plastic ornament than in his metalwork; but he felt obliged to apply it here and there on capitals, cornices, brackets, and so forth, just as conventional architects of the time used the common coin of the Renaissance or Gothic vocabularies.

The Tassel façade may be almost unnoticeable today unless one looks carefully for its exposed metalwork and its rather original detailing, but it evidently had an almost instant appeal in the Brussels of the nineties. The somewhat similar Frison house at 37 Rue Lebeau was built in 1893-4, and in 1895 three more houses were begun, of which the finest is the much larger Hôtel Solvay at 224 Avenue Louise.^[377] This house was built, together with a laboratory started a year later, over a period of several years for the famous chemist Ernest Solvay. It remains the most complete of Horta’s domestic commissions, since it retains all the original furniture designed by the architect, though now a maison de couture. The broad façade is much more plastic than that of the Tassel house with the walls curving forward in the first and second storeys to enframe two tall flanking bays subdivided by metal colonnettes and transoms (Plate 131A). The ironwork of the balconies is especially rich and characteristic. In the interiors the exposed metal structure and various elaborate incidental features, such as the lighting fixtures, participate fully in the general pattern of organic curvature. Although plant-like in feeling, Horta’s metalwork is quite as abstract as Gaudí’s grilles in the entrance arches of the Palau Güell (Plate 96B) and often achieves a comparable distinction considered as craftsmanship.

The house of Baron Van Eetvelde of 1895 at 4 Avenue Palmerston—the extension to the left numbered 2 is considerably later—has a quite different exterior from the Solvay house. The front has an almost Sullivanian range of arched bays consisting entirely of exposed metalwork. Inside, the salon is even more of a masterpiece than the stair-hall of the Tassel house. A circle of iron columns, curving up into elliptical arches, supports a low dome of glass across which long leaf-like bands of transparent colour continue the sinuous structural curves below. In a happy floral metaphor the lighting fixtures bend and droop, each electric bulb shaded by a coloured glass bell of over-blown tulip shape. Not since Nicholas Pineau developed the pittoresque version of the Rococo in the second quarter of the eighteenth century had such elegant consistency and originality been seen in the decorative exploitation of plant-like elements.

Horta’s other fine houses in Brussels range in date down to the Wiener house of 1919 in the Avenue de l’Astronomie. After the very elegant and restrained Hallet house of 1906 at 346 Avenue Louise they became so dry and so formal that the term Art Nouveau hardly applies to them, however. There are two much earlier examples at 23-25 Rue Américaine, built in 1898, which are of special interest because Horta occupied them himself. The virtuoso elaboration of the interwoven structural and decorative ironwork of the oriel on the one to the left and the continuous ribbon-window set behind iron mullions in the top storey of the other are among the most striking and original external features he ever designed. These years at the very end of the century undoubtedly represent the peak of his career. His most advanced domestic planning was to be seen in the Aubecq house of 1900 at 520 Avenue Louise, demolished in 1950 (Figure 34). There the interflow of space between the interlocking octagonal reception rooms of the ground storey comes very close to that found in certain early houses by Wright (see Chapters 15 and 19).

Certainly Horta’s most important single work is the Maison du Peuple of 1896-9. This was built for the city authorities of Brussels on a curiously-shaped site of which Horta took the fullest advantage. Extending around a segment of a circular place and part way along two radial streets, the façade forms a continuous but irregular series of curves, mostly concave, but with the main entrance placed in one of the shorter convex portions. The greater part of the exterior wall consists of a visible skeleton of iron with solid masonry sections defining the ends and the entrance bay. The vertical stanchions are not curved, but many of the horizontal members are slightly arched. Decorative metal elements at some of the intersections attempt, not altogether successfully, to give to the structural grid the over-all organic quality so happily achieved in the Van Eetvelde entrance hall. As in his houses, Horta had difficulty in assimilating the carved detail of the stonework, here associated with wall panels of brick, to the metalwork; where the two come close together, as in the entrance arch of mixed materials, the result is very awkward indeed.

Comparison with Sullivan’s work of these years is inevitable—there is really nothing else of the precise period with which the Maison du Peuple can properly be compared. With Sullivan the main structural members of metal are always covered with terracotta and the visible metalwork is almost entirely decorative. Yet there is considerable similarity in the way Sullivan handled the metal mullions at the entrances of the Carson, Pirie & Scott Store, mullions which rise into and interweave with the ornament above, to Horta’s attempt to merge the structural and the decorative in his framework of visible metal elements here.

His greatest success at this was certainly in the auditorium at the top of the Maison du Peuple. In this the openwork iron beams that support the roof, forming a sort of hammerbeam system with the side galleries, have graceful and expressive but essentially structural curves (Plate 132B). To these the decorative railings of the galleries provide a delicate and harmonious counterpoint in their intricately plant-like detailing. Around the structural frame the auditorium is enclosed only by glass or by very thin panels held in metal frames, rather like the ‘curtain-walls’ of the mid twentieth century; thus there is in this permanent edifice a good deal of the volumetric lightness previously associated with temporary exhibition buildings only.

Among Horta’s commercial buildings in various Belgian cities the most conspicuous was the Innovation Department Store of 1901 in the Rue Neuve in Brussels (Plate 131B). The front, almost entirely of metal and glass though set in a granite frame, was a remarkable example of Art Nouveau decorative design at fully architectural scale. The Innovation completely overshadowed the equally bold but extremely coarse and clumsy Old England Department Store just off the Place Royale in Brussels, also almost entirely of iron and glass, that was built by Paul Saintenoy (1832-92) two years earlier. In the Gros Waucquez Building in the Rue de Sable of 1903-5 and the Wolfers Building of 1906 in the Rue d’Arenberg, as in his houses of those later years, Horta’s treatment is much more restrained than in the department store. Stone piers subdivide their façades, curves are fewer and more structural, and there is much less ornament and almost no exposed iron.

It is a historical paradox that Horta’s architectural career should have continued long after the Art Nouveau was forgotten, bringing him in the end such public esteem and material success as few other innovators of his generation ever knew. Yet his later work, beginning with his Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, designed in 1914 just before the First World War but begun only in 1923, and continuing down to his Central Station there, begun in 1938 and only lately completed, is of purely local significance. What brought him a peerage and a street named after him—that at the side of his Palais des Beaux-Arts—was not his early work of the Art Nouveau years, standing with Sullivan’s skyscrapers like a landmark at the beginning of modern architecture, but this later official work which is almost totally without intrinsic interest and, in the case of the station, actually rather monstrous. The contrast with Sullivan’s barren later years after 1904 is very striking.

Despite the poetic justice that there might be in ignoring a Belgian who long falsely claimed the credit for the invention of the Art Nouveau, one cannot turn to other countries without mentioning the name of Henri Van de Velde (1863-1957).^[378] In 1892, when Horta designed the Tassel house, Van de Velde had not even begun to practise architecture. His first work, which is his own house of 1895-6 at Uccle near Brussels, though still rather conventional externally in a simple, almost peasant way perhaps influenced by Voysey, included furniture more functional than Horta’s, if much less elegant and imaginative. He also brought to Brussels—and later to Paris, Berlin, and Weimar—an interpretation of Ruskin’s and Morris’s sociological approach to the arts that had a wide and growing influence, for he pursued his mature career as decorator, architect, and educator largely outside Belgium^[379] (see Chapters 17 and 20).