1861 – 1947 · architecture, ironwork, furniture
Victor Horta
Iron structures blooming into whiplash curves beneath top-lit stairwells, every railing and handle grown from the same stem.
The record
Victor Horta, born in Ghent on 6 January 1861, transformed the Brussels town house with the Hôtel Tassel of 1893, integrating exposed iron structure, open plans and the curving 'whiplash' line into a unified language.
A sequence of private hotels for liberal-bourgeois patrons through about 1901 made Brussels the capital of Art Nouveau architecture.
Later working in a classical idiom and teaching for decades, he died in Brussels on 8 September 1947; four of his town houses are UNESCO World Heritage sites.
Iron structures blooming into whiplash curves beneath top-lit stairwells, every railing and handle grown from the same stem.