Victor Horta

1861–1947 · Belgian · 7 buildings on the wall

Victor Horta (1861–1947) was a Belgian architect and designer, one of the founders of the Art Nouveau movement and a forerunner of modern architecture through his open plans and his use of iron, steel and glass. An admirer of the French theorist Viollet-le-Duc, he first worked with glass and iron on the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken. In 2000 four of his Brussels town houses were listed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, praised for "their open plan, the diffusion of light" and the joining of curved decoration with structure.

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The Autrique House (1893) came just before the Hôtel Tassel (1894), often called the first Art Nouveau house, where slender iron columns carry a large bay window. The Hôtel van Eetvelde (1898) and his own Horta House (1901), now the Horta Museum, followed. Later he moved to a more geometric, Art Deco-influenced style: at the Centre for Fine Arts (Bozar) in Brussels (1928), reinforced concrete let him shape a horseshoe-shaped concert hall. Brussels-Central Station, delayed by economic trouble and war, was finished in 1952. Victor Horta's houses are studied for light, open plans and structure joined to ornament.

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