Victor ort modernism in architecture. Services and prices. Victor Horta - life and works

Victor Horta was born in Ghent on January 6, 1861. He studied for a year at the Ghent Conservatory. Then he began to study architecture at the Ghent Academy of Fine Arts. In 1878 he worked in Paris with the architect J. Dubuisson. In 1880 he entered the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with A. Bal. The first independent works were three houses on the Rue Douz Chambray in Ghent. From 1890 he built a large row of houses in Brussels, including the Tassel mansion on the Rue de Turin.

Brussels in the 1880–1890s was a center of artistic culture, where the paths of the main innovative movements in art crossed. Horta himself emphasized the importance of his contacts with artists in the process of developing a new architectural style.

It is no coincidence, therefore, that it was the Belgian who managed to create the building that began the Art Nouveau line in Art Nouveau architecture - the Tassel mansion in Brussels. This house was the first building on the continent that was truly bold in its architectural design. Completed in 1893, when there were no signs of new European architecture, Horta's house marks a turning point in the development of residential architecture.

The house on Rue de Turin is surrounded by ordinary residential buildings in Brussels. Since it had to meet the conditions required for other houses, its dimensions were the same as those of the surrounding buildings. Its façade is only seven meters long. The building plan, developed based on these predetermined relationships, was solved in a completely original way.

In a typical Brussels house, the entire lower floor is visible directly from the entrance. Horta avoided the traditional technique by arranging the floor at different levels. Thus, the living room is located half a floor higher than the hall that leads into it. The difference in level is just one of the ways Horta used to give flexibility to the layout of the lower floor. He hollowed out the massive body of the house, introducing light shafts that served as new unusual sources of lighting for such a narrow façade. Photographs cannot convey the amazing relationships that exist between these spaces located on different levels.

Horta's house was admired for two reasons: it closely matched the tastes of the owner, and it completely lacked any features of previous historical styles. Five years after the house was built, Ludwig Hevesy, an Austrian critic, published an article that shows the importance that contemporaries attached to the house built by Horta.

“Now, in 1898, the most inspired of modern architects, Victor Horta, lives in Brussels... His fame is exactly six years old, it began with the construction of Mr. Tassel’s house on Rue de Turin. This is one of the first known modern houses that fits its owner as well as a perfectly tailored dress. This house ideally provides a “habitat” for the person for whom it was built. The house is very simple and logical. But - and let us note this - there is not the slightest imitation of any historical style in it. Its lines and curved surfaces have a rare charm.”

Tassel's mansion was the first in a series of brilliant buildings by Victor Orta. It can be considered that true modernism in architecture begins with the Tassel mansion. Tassel's mansion is a small four-story building facing the red building line with its end facade, squeezed between neighboring buildings and its main body extending into the depths. Here Horta waived the order. True, the façade of the mansion maintains symmetry. Above the entrance, at the level of the second and third floors, the architect centers the building with a large bay window, above which is a balcony. To the right and left of the central axis there are narrow windows. The protruding bay window is organically fused with the wall; it seems to grow out of it. The large bay window has metal frames. But even more innovative was the interior design of the mansion. It is built upward rather than horizontally. There is no enfilade or corridor system. The main role is played by the staircase, which leads upstairs, becoming perhaps the most ceremonial element of the interior. Inside, Horta uses thin metal columns.

There is a lot more about Victor Horta and his buildings
http://artclassic.edu.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=22608
http://ziggyibruni.livejournal.com/22186.html

Posted on Apr. 21st, 2010 at 01:10 pm | | | |

Style Art Nouveau(in Russia - modern, Germany and the Baltics – art nouveau, Austria – secession, Italy – liberty) appeared in art and architecture at the endXIX century. A feature of this artistic style was the rejection of straight, hard lines and an appeal to more natural and lively curves. Often, nature itself served as a source of inspiration for creating new creations made in this style.

Victor Orta

This style received a special flourishing in Belgium. Brussels in the 1880s - 1890s was a center of artistic culture, where the paths of the main innovative movements in art intersected. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the Belgian Victor Horta (1861 – 1947), who became famous for his unusual shapes and lines, bright decorativeness and wild imagination, became an iconic figure of the Art Nouveau style.

Victor Horta was born in the Belgian city of Ghent on January 6, 1861. He began his studies at the Ghent Conservatory. However, his interest in fine arts and architecture turned out to be stronger than his attachment to music, so he entered the Academy of Arts in the architectural department. While still a very young man, he worked in France, with the architect J. Dubuisson. Then Victor Horta continued his studies in Brussels, at the Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1897 he began teaching there.

In 1885, Horta completed his first 3 orders - residential buildings in his native Ghent. However, he was not looking for easy and quick fame, so over the next 8 years he honed his skills on small sculptural forms and participated in various competitions. Gradually, he developed his own style, where straight vertical lines gave way to smooth curves that enhanced the sense of space.

House of Othric (Maison Autrique ). 1893

The opportunity to put his accumulated skills to use appeared in 1893, when the architect built a house commissioned by his friend, engineer Eugene Autric. The house is made, rather, in a transitional style, close to eclecticism, but that’s what makes it interesting. Orth's future characteristic style is emerging: a combination of symmetrical and asymmetrical elements, industrial building materials (concrete, iron, glass), an interesting solution for the facade, which seems to “grow” out of the sidewalk and continues it.

Tassel Mansion (H ô tel Tassel ). 1893 – 1897

Around the same time, Victor Horta built a house for Emile Tassel, a professor of descriptive geometry at the University of Brussels. This mansion is considered the world's first architectural embodiment of the Art Nouveau style. Here the architect boldly uses his unique sense of the fluidity of space and everything that will later be found in his works: steel structures, the integrity of the decor and structure of the building, the abundance of natural light. The Tassel mansion is a real “portrait house” that fully corresponds to its owner. The materials used were different types of stone, forged steel, glass, and wood. The voluminous facade fits perfectly into the surrounding houses, but is not lost against their background. The composition is symmetrical, the solid stone parts of the building are in balance with a light glass bay window, supported by a powerful semicircular steel mezzanine cornice. Inside, the house is divided into two parallel “blocks”. The one with windows facing the street contains offices and reception rooms. Living rooms, dining room, kitchen are located in the back of the building. Orta equipped the house with original heating and ventilation systems.

Facade of the Van Etvelde mansion. 1895 – 1901

Of interest are the metal columns in the interior of the mansion, which are full of ornamental meaning and at the same time have specific functionality. By skillfully combining glass and metal, the architect achieved a certain effect, thanks to which light penetrated everywhere, and the landing turned into an illuminated center of the living space. The rooms of the mansion were simply flooded with light. Victor Orta allocated most of the area of the first floor of the house, from the courtyard side, as a winter garden, and placed the non-passable rooms of the upper floors around the central hall and the internal staircase, illuminated by a glass lantern. The staircase leading to the second floor is stunning with the grace of curved lines and recalls the fragility and beauty of nature - grass and trees.

His imagination in interior decoration goes beyond the boundaries of architecture and strives for freedom of painting. “I asked myself,” said the master, “why can’t architects be as independent as artists?” For Orth, metal is alive and capable of turning into plants, herbs and flowers, and into streams of water. Metal plexuses resembling branches and leaves “grow” on the columns, like on tree trunks. They are surrounded by the subtle ornamentation of the wrought-iron stair railings, as well as the elegance of bright stained glass windows, the geometric pattern of marble mosaic floors and the regularity of low wall panels that divide the space into sections. He sought to use metal and glass in such a way as to reveal their organic qualities and give these materials a new architectural and artistic expressiveness.

At the Tassel mansion, Victor Horta pioneered the use of a line called the “lash of the whip,” which became a figurative expression of the tense spirit of the period, and its grace became an example of graphic art and stylization in the windows and stained glass windows of Art Nouveau buildings. (The famous “whiplash” line became the hallmark of the Art Nouveau style. This is what one critic called the spectacular bend of the stem on Herman Obrist’s 1895 curtain.)

Interior of the hall of the Tassel mansion. 1893 – 1897

Solvay Mansion (H ô tel Solvay ). 1894 – 1903

In the period from 1895 to 1903, the architect fulfilled the order of the family of industrialist Armand Solvay and created a unique 5-story mansion with a slightly concave facade, decorated with functional elements from Orta’s favorite materials - steel and glass.

Victor Orta proposed a house project to millionaire Armand Solvay that reflected a progressive view of man and his environment. Inside there are characteristic light wells, a winter garden, a lot of free space, the rooms are organized with maximum convenience for living.

View of the glass roof of the Tassel mansion. 1893 – 1897

Based on the then ideas about physiology, the architect dreamed of ensuring that colors and lines affected a person’s biological rhythms, increasing his “energy productivity.” He linked architectural forms with the consumption of biological energy, trying to reduce the amount of useless human effort and promote the harmony of his everyday gestures. Thus, when developing the shapes of stairs or door handles, Orta took into account the anatomical naturalness of movements, and planned the volume of rooms based on the fact that a person inhales approximately 10 thousand liters of air per day. The architect refused conventional ventilation. Based on the general principles of physics - warm air rises, moisture condenses on cold eaves, air movement requires inlet and outlet openings - he created an innovative and natural system of acclimatization, ventilation and heating.

View of the stairwell of the Tassel mansion. 1893 – 1897

The sun's rays enter the Solvay mansion through the glass ceiling, flooding the staircase, which serves as its central organizing element. With the help of a system of mirrors, light reaches the most remote corners of the house, and artfully placed lamps cast picturesque reflections everywhere. The walls are decorated with frescoes, which use the spectacular “dégradé” technique: the colors gradually fade towards the ceiling, and the image becomes paler. Knowing that the carpets made according to his design would be the first to wear out, Orta repeated the design on the parquet floor so that they could then be restored according to this pattern...

Solvay generously gave Victor Horta absolute carte blanche regarding the project, budget and completion date. That is why the Solvay mansion represents an extraordinary harmony of the whole and details. Everything here was thought out by one architect - from the supporting structure to the shapes of door handles, hinges and window latches. A new word in architecture is combined with the flavor of the era, and engineering solutions are put at the service of beauty.

1 Interior of the hall of the Solvay mansion. 1894 – 1903. 2. View of the staircase of the Solvay mansion. 1894 – 1903

People's House. 1897 – 1899

The freshness of the new style was clearly demonstrated in the People's House, built in Brussels between 1897 and 1899. It was commissioned by the Brussels Federation of the Workers' Party and combines functionality and originality with the audacity of a constructive solution. It was a single steel skeleton filled with large glass planes. The corner plot with access to the square allowed the architect to unusually curve the main facade of the building and place the main entrance in the center of the concave line. In the interior, the curve of the facade opens into the vast space of the dining room-restaurant. Above the dining room there is a lecture hall, the walls of which are entirely made of metal elements.

Interior of the living room of the Solvay mansion. 1894 – 1903

House of Orth (Maison Horta). 1898 – 1900

In 1898, Horta received permission to build his own house. The architect's house consists of two buildings connected from the inside. Moreover, each part of the house has its own unique face. According to Orta’s tradition, the living part is separated from the working part (in this case, from the architect’s studio), the staircase represents the “spine” of the entire structure, there are light wells and mosaics. (It is now home to the Victor Horta Museum.)

View of the glass roof of the Van Uytvelde mansion. 1895 – 1897

Department storeInnovation . 1901

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Victor Horta built several commercial buildings. Among them is a department store Innovation, built in Brussels in 1901. During the formation of the Art Nouveau style, a new type of building appeared - a department store, which required the use of large glazed surfaces. Innovative from this point of view was the Orta building, where an open iron frame was used. Its façade illuminated the general trading floor of the ground floor, the trading galleries of the upper floors, the staircase, and had many metal interlacings.

Interior of the living room of Orta's house. 1898 – 1900

It was Victor Orta who became the first major architect who began to widely use steel structures, glass and stained glass in the construction of private houses, which made it possible to organize the interior space of the building in a new way, opening the way to air and light into the house. He came to this idea while working with his teacher Alphonse Balat on the construction of the royal greenhouses in Lequesne near Brussels. Later, many architects imitated his techniques, but could not compare with the master.

Horta also continued a tradition that was strong in France - a romantic interpretation of the Gothic. “I want to express the plan and design of the building in the facade as it was done in Gothic, and like Gothic, reveal the material, and display nature in stylized decor,” said Victor Orta.

Staircase in Orta's house. 1898 – 1900

Victor Horta also showed himself to be a master of interior design. His creations are characterized by the novelty of architectural decoration, as well as the combination of irrational symbolism with rational functionality. The decor of the facade, as a rule, is combined with the interior decoration, in which every detail is thought out and connected into a single ornament, where a stylized floral pattern reigns, plastic flexible forms, which are based on the same “blow of the whip”. A passion for transforming forms, a subtle understanding of color and texture, and aesthetic taste helped to use familiar materials in a completely new way.

The facades with twisted balcony grilles and intricate bay windows, round windows above the doors and multi-colored images of orchids and “flowing” female silhouettes on the walls are truly amazing. Each of these buildings is a striking example of a style that rushed like a comet through the history of art, leaving a short but deep mark on it.

View of the glass roof of Orta's house. 1898 – 1900

Interior of the dining room of Orta's house. 1898 – 1900

In 1915, Horta lived in London, and soon moved to the United States. Here he remained until 1918, until the end of the First World War. In 1922 - 1928, the architect created the project for the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels. Since 1927 he directed the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts. The life of this famous architect was cut short in 1947. The mansions of Tassel, Solvay, Uitveld and Horta himself are recognized as part of the UNESCO heritage.

Useless in its aesthetic excesses, Art Nouveau could only live for a moment, but in that moment the artist’s eternal dream of absolute art came true. Like any peak, Art Nouveau was also a dead end. Now this path has been completed, masterpieces have been created, the style has exhausted itself. The new artistic movement, which flared up like a sparkler in the 1890s, was destined to have a short life. After the First World War, massive reconstruction of destroyed cities began in Europe, and exquisite Art Nouveau was not suitable for the construction of residential areas with cheap apartments.

Architects

Profound changes in the entire cultural situation and, in particular, artistic tastes in the field of architecture turned out to be focused in the work and in the very personality of Christopher Wren, who, in terms of his significance for the era, is rightly placed on a par with the most remarkable Englishmen of the 17th century -...

The founders and main leaders of the neoclassical movement in English architecture were the Adam brothers, the sons of the famous architect William Adam. The most talented of them was Robert. Robert Adam's architectural activity was exceptionally wide. Together with his brothers James, John and William, his permanent employees, he built...
In the work of Behrens, which was the most noticeable phenomenon in the architecture of Germany in the early 1920s, the progressive and reactionary tendencies of his time were intricately intertwined. The stiffness of Great Prussian chauvinism was combined with admiration for human labor, inert traditionalism with sober rationalism and the courage of constructive...
Perhaps no creative personality in the history of Soviet architecture has attracted such close attention, caused such opposing opinions, fierce debates and contradictory assessments as the personality of Zholtovsky. He was called a classic and an epigone, an innovator and an imitator, they wanted to learn from him and then...
American architect Louis Henry Sullivan became one of the pioneers of rationalist architecture of the 20th century. His work in the field of architectural theory is even more significant. Sullivan set himself a grandiose utopian task: to transform society through the means of architecture and lead it to humanistic goals. Theory…
On September 20, 1744, representatives of two famous Italian families, Giacomo Antonio Quarenghi and Maria Ursula Rota, had a second son, named after Giacomo Antonio's father. This happened in the picturesque small village of Capiatone in the Rota d'Imagna district, part of the province of northern Italian...
Perhaps in no other area of Italian artistic culture was the turn to a new understanding so closely associated with the name of one brilliant master as in architecture, where Brunelleschi was the founder of a new direction. Filippo Brunelleschi was born in 1377 in...
Bove went through a long creative path - from an unknown student of the Kremlin expedition to the “chief architect” of Moscow. He was a subtle artist who knew how to combine the simplicity and expediency of a compositional solution with the sophistication and beauty of architectural forms and decor. The architect deeply understood Russian architecture, was creative...
Exploring the “Sterling phenomenon” and emphasizing his undoubted creative originality, J. Summerson is amazed at the glory of the master, “considering that probably no more than three or four of his completed buildings (none of them a cathedral or a viceroy’s palace) are known to be of any significant part of the population"...

Victor Orta

"Victor Horta"

Victor Horta was born in Ghent on January 6, 1861. He studied for a year at the Ghent Conservatory. Then he began to study architecture at the Ghent Academy of Fine Arts. In 1878 he worked in Paris with the architect J. Dubuisson. In 1880 he entered the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with A. Bal. The first independent works are three houses on Douz Chambray Street in Ghent. From 1890 he built a large row of houses in Brussels, including the Tassel mansion on the Rue de Turin.

Brussels in the 1880-1890s was a center of artistic culture, where the paths of the main innovative movements in art intersected. Horta himself emphasized the importance of his contacts with artists in the process of developing a new architectural style.

In a typical Brussels house, the entire lower floor is visible directly from the entrance. Horta avoided the traditional technique by arranging the floor at different levels. Thus, the living room is located one floor higher than the hall that leads into it. The difference in level is just one of the ways Horta used to give flexibility to the layout of the lower floor. He hollowed out the massive body of the house, introducing light shafts that served as new unusual sources of lighting for such a narrow façade. Photographs cannot convey the amazing relationships that exist between these spaces located on different levels.

Horta's house was admired for two reasons: it closely matched the tastes of the owner, and it completely lacked any features of previous historical styles.

"Victor Horta"

Five years after the house was built, Ludwig Hevesy, an Austrian critic, published an article that shows the importance that contemporaries attached to the house built by Horta.

"Now, in 1898, lives in Brussels the most inspired of modern architects - Victor Horta: His fame is exactly six years old, it began with the construction of the house of Mr. Tassel on the rue de Turin. This is one of the first famous modern houses, which is also suitable to its owner, like an impeccably tailored dress. This house ideally provides a “living environment” for the person for whom it was built. The house is very simple and logical. But - and we note this - there is not the slightest imitation of any historical style. surfaces have a rare charm."

In the drawing room of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (1818), John Nash quite openly showed the cast iron columns and beams that formed the frame structure, but no one before Horta had dared to expose the structure inside a residential building. In Orta's house, the staircase has columns and beams that attract attention with their shape and decoration. The living room is even more remarkable in this regard: an I-beam supporting beam runs completely open through the room.

The visitor gets the first impression of the interior of the house from a cast-iron column, as if growing from the raised landing of the first floor. Curved cast iron “leaves” extend from its vase-shaped capital. With their shape, the capitals partly resemble simple plants, and partly original abstract drawings. Their lines are freely continued on the smooth surface of the walls and vault and on the floor mosaic in the form of dynamic curvilinear patterns.

The house on the Rue de Turin represents the first application of the principles of the "new art" in the field of architecture. Here, for the first time, the main element of the new style - cast iron construction - becomes apparent. What are these lines but the unfurled ribbons and rosettes that are found under the eaves of many Belgian railway stations? They have simply been stripped of their pseudo-Gothic or Renaissance masquerade.

The architecture of the facade of the house on Via de Turin is as original as the interior.

"Victor Horta"

The bay window, a standard feature of every Brussels home, has been retained, but Horta has transformed it into a curved surface with deep glazed openings. The smooth wall seamlessly blends into this protruding part of the façade. Despite the new styling, the façade is quite conservative for the time the house was built: it is just the usual type of solid stone wall.

When asked how he came to build such an innovative structure as the house on Rue de Turin, Horta replied in the summer of 1938 that in his youth the aspiring architect had three paths before him: to become a specialist in the “styles” of the Renaissance, Classical or Gothic . Horta considered such restrictions illogical: “I asked myself, why can’t architects be as independent as artists?” This is how the architect saw Balat, whom he considered his teacher. “Balat is a classic and an innovator, the best Belgian architect of the 19th century,” said Horta.

From a modern point of view, the house on Via de Turin is notable for the fact that it took advantage of the opportunities that arose in connection with the use of new materials, and implemented a free arrangement of rooms on different floors. This is one of the first attempts in Europe to create a new architectural solution for space using the method that Le Corbusier later called the “free plan”.

Since 1897, Horta taught at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts. That same year he built the People's House in Brussels. Its curving façade of glass and metal represents one of the boldest architectural designs of the era. The freshness of design that is so characteristic of the building on the Rue de Turin is even more evident in the People's House. In this building of the trade union, Horta truly showed himself to be a pioneer, as one of his contemporaries called him. Its facade, interior space, and interior are very different from Orta’s previous works. Diners are immediately welcomed into an expansive dining room with wide openings and exposed cast iron framing. Horta placed a lecture hall, which is used relatively rarely, on the top floor. In every detail of the People's House one can feel the hand of an experienced architect, who at the same time was also a brilliant inventor.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Horta built several commercial buildings.

In 1901, he used an open iron frame in the construction of the Novovvedenie store building (Brussels).

In 1915, Horta lived in London, and soon moved to the United States. Here he remained until 1918, until the end of the First World War. In 1922-1928, the architect created a project for the Palace of Fine Arts for Brussels.

Horta had a brilliant career. Since 1927 he directed the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts.

Orta's style is characterized by emphasized novelty and even sensationalism. He not only created a new architectural decor, but also actively used those forms that were already widely used, but enjoyed the status of “new”, “modern”. Therefore, in Orta’s work a combination of the aesthetics of symbolism of the irrationalistic “organic” principle and rationalistic tendencies arose. The combination of these opposing trends can be observed in the design of the main facade of the People's House, which has an “organic” free plan, and in the vertical plane is a typical example of rationalism of the late 19th century.

In this sense, Horta continued a very stable tradition in France - the romantic interpretation of Gothic, when the forms of Gothic architecture were compared with the forms of the plant world. The Gothic openwork characteristic of many of the works of these architects came from this source. “I want to express the plan and design of the building in the facade as it was done in Gothic,” said Orta, “and, like Gothic, reveal the material, and display nature in stylized decor.”

18+, 2015, website, “Seventh Ocean Team”. Team coordinator:

We provide free publication on the website.
Publications on the site are the property of their respective owners and authors.

In Germany - “Jugendstil”, in Russia - “modern”, but most often this art direction is called “art nouveau”, that is, “new art” in French. In painting, the most famous author is the Austrian Klimt, in sculpture - the Frenchman Rodin, and in architecture, perhaps, the Spaniard Gaudi. But Gaudi was not a pioneer of this architectural movement. Another master is considered the founder of Art Nouveau in architecture.

City mansions by architect Victor Horta
UNESCO Site No. 1005. Inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2000.
Belgium, Brussels city.

The surname Horta is sometimes read in Russian in the Walloon manner: “Horta”, with an emphasis on the “a”. But in bilingual Belgium they could also read “Horta” - I like it better. In his biography, as is often the case with biographies of artists, nothing excites the reader. Born in Belgium, worked in Paris, became interested in decorative plant patterns. And in 1893 he built the world's first house in the Art Nouveau style - a mansion for Professor Emil Tassel:

A year later, in the same area, he built a house for Armand Solvay, the son of a wealthy industrialist:

Horta's works determined the appearance of this Brussels district, which was built up at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. On the city map, these are the blocks west of Avenue Louise. On almost every street you will find residential buildings, shops and restaurants built in the Art Nouveau style that Horta introduced. For example, on Defax Street, not far from each other, you can see mansions built by Horta’s friend, the architect Paul Hankar. He built one for the artist Rene Jansen...

And the other one is for yourself:

Before switching to large public buildings, Horta also managed to build a mansion for himself. Art Nouveau lovers flock to him in droves:

Architecture of Victor Horta in the UNESCO World Heritage Site: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1005

Brussels is the mecca and medina of “new art”. Shekhtel, Walcott or Alexander Ivanov, who erected Moscow buildings in this style, were inspired by the works of Brussels architects. If you're in Brussels, don't forget that this is the capital of Art Nouveau. The mansions are still inhabited, some belong to private individuals and it is difficult to get into them. But you can always go to Horta’s house-museum, which is located in his own mansion, which has now become state property.

The second UNESCO site in Brussels is the architectural ensemble of the square.