Victor Horta’s masterpiece town houses

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Victor Horta’s masterpiece town houses

Published: 24 Mar. 2025, 00:05 Updated: 26 Mar. 2025, 20:39

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Kim Bong-ryeol

The author is an architect and professor emeritus at Korea National University of Arts.

By the 1890s, as the Industrial Revolution neared its culmination, Europe’s maturing bourgeois society longed for an art form of its own. Yet much of the art that remained was steeped in the antiquated traditions of the aristocracy. In response, parallel movements emerged across major European countries under the banner of a “new art”: the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain, the Secessionist groups in the German-speaking world, and Art Nouveau in the Francophone sphere. These movements sought the source of beauty in nature, combining the rational functionality of modernity with the artisanal finesse of the medieval age.

The first architectural embodiment of the Art Nouveau aesthetic emerged in Brussels, Belgium. In 1893, Victor Horta (1861–1947) designed the Hôtel Tassel, a town house for the Tassel family. One of several adjoining homes in a typical Brussels town house row, the narrow facade was adorned with curving ironwork and undulating glass windows. Inside, Horta pierced the center of the four-story home with a staircase hall topped by a skylight, allowing natural light to flood every level. The elegantly sweeping banisters and stairs, cast-iron columns shaped like tree branches, and vine-patterned motifs across the walls and floors created a mysterious, harmonious space — an entirely new spatial language that dismantled centuries of rigid, enclosed classicism in one stroke.

Interior of the Hôtel Tassel, a townhouse for the Tassel family, is the first architectural embodiment of the Art Nouveau aesthetic. [KIM BONG-RYEOL]

Several other town houses Horta designed in Brussels — the Hôtel Solvay, Hôtel van Eetvelde and his own residence, the Maison Horta — were later inscribed alongside the Hôtel Tassel as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Each features open, flowing interiors suffused with natural light and organic motifs, conjuring dreamlike environments reminiscent of tropical jungles or winter gardens. Now open to the public as the Horta Museum, his former home presents an Art Nouveau space in its most distilled form — like a miniature opera house crafted in light, metal, and glass.

Art Nouveau met an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. During the postwar recovery, its exquisite craftsmanship and high production costs led many to dismiss it as an “archaic luxury.” In its place rose a world dominated by standardized, mass-produced, and economically efficient architecture. Yet the DNA of Art Nouveau persists as a wellspring of luxury design. Its legacy endures in the continued allure of high-end brands — objects of aspiration that still echo the movement’s spirit of beauty and refinement.

Translated using generative AI and edited by Korea JoongAng Daily staff.