![]() The interior is dreamlike and immersive a spiralling journey that starts with the marble stairs in the reception rooms and continues up into the glazed and mirrored roof-space. It is all here: the ‘biomorphic whiplash’ lines, the floridly decorative use of iron and glass, the obsessively detailed joinery and the intense interplay of materials and surfaces. The house is a full-bodied expression of the style’s most significant tropes. Horta’s design for his own house and atelier was a mature work, but also one that marked the end of art nouveau for him. It was the start of a remarkably productive and inventive period for both Horta and Brussels, in which the city became the home of the architectural avant-garde of the time. This work was Horta’s first fully realised art nouveau design, a remarkable and revolutionary new architectural style. The Maison Autrique, built in 1893, was innovative in the way it introduced riveted ironwork into a domestic interior, but it was the Hôtel Tassel (designed 1892–93) that marked a decisive stylistic and spatial departure. During the 1880s his work was broadly Beaux Arts in inspiration, typified by the Edicule Lambeaux, an exquisite little classical pavilion he designed in 1890 for the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. Horta’s career was long and distinguished but the period in which he designed his most important works was – like the style of art nouveau – intense and brief. In truth though, the museum’s main exhibit is the architect’s house. The exhibition is interesting in itself, helping to situate Horta’s work within the wider context of Belgian art nouveau, and Horth’s embroidery is extraordinarily delicate and skilful. The exterior of the Maison & Atelier Horta. It also coincides with a number of significant anniversaries: it is 100 years since Horta sold the house, 50 years since it opened as a museum and 30 years since an extensive restoration. The exhibition runs through the house and the atelier as well as a third, purpose-built gallery space that has recently opened. Horta’s own collection of Asian art and rare marble forms part of the displays, along with a private collection of art nouveau furniture curated by Jonathan Mangelinckx and a reflection on the act of collecting explored through video and embroidery by Elisabeth Horth. The museum is hosting, until 30 June, an exhibition on the theme of collecting. The house and studio – located on the rue Américaine in central Brussels – are both perfectly preserved, frozen at an imagined moment when they were still occupied by Horta and his family. ![]() ![]() Today they are home to the Horta Museum, an institution dedicated to celebrating the work of Brussels’ pioneering art nouveau architect. The Maison & Atelier Horta were designed by Victor Horta in 1898 to be both a family home and an architecture studio. Such buildings exist outside the practical needs they were built to address and are preserved much as works of art are. ![]() T h ere is a category of houses so famous that they can no longer be used as houses. ![]()
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