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.
Figure 34. Victor Horta: Brussels, Aubecq house, 1900, plan
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.