Victor Horta

Victor Horta (1861-1947) was a Belgian architect born in Ghent. After studying in Ghent and Paris, he studied architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and assisted the royal architect Alphonse Balat on the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, his first work in iron and glass. His Hôtel Tassel in Brussels (1892-1893), a town house for a professor, is regarded as one of the first Art Nouveau buildings.

In his Brussels town houses Horta left iron columns and beams exposed and shaped them, along with railings, mosaics, door handles and furniture, into curving lines based on plant stems. He used skylights and glass partitions to bring daylight into the middle of narrow row-house plots and arranged rooms around stair halls on several levels. Four of these houses, the Hôtel Tassel, Hôtel Solvay (1895-1900), Hôtel van Eetvelde (1895-1901) and his own house and studio in Saint-Gilles (1898-1901, now the Horta Museum), were listed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000.

His Maison du Peuple (1896-1899), the headquarters of the Belgian Workers' Party, had an iron and glass facade; it was demolished in 1965. The Waucquez department store (1905-1906) now houses the Belgian Comic Strip Center. His later Centre for Fine Arts (1923-1929) and Brussels-Central Station, designed from 1912 and completed in 1952, are plainer Art Deco designs. King Albert I made him a baron in 1932.