Blog Assignment 2: Art Nouveau

            The era of ‘Art Nouvea’ was a period of art and architectural ideals that emerged around the turn of the 20^th century.  While it only lasted about a decade, it still has had a lasting affect on the architecture we see today.  It was a worldwide movement that encompassed arts and crafts, furniture, architecture, fashion and so much more.  Some of the people who had the greatest effects on the era and what we see today were Hector Guimard, Victor Horta, and Henry Van de Velde.

http://piclund.com/hector-guimard-paris-metro.html

            Hector Guimard, having common schooling with Victor Horta, was an architect who originally took note from Viollet-le-Duc.  He worked primarily in France, but was influenced by many movements at the time, primarily the arts and crafts movement of England.  Many of his early works had touches of Gothic in them, but without Voillet’s love of the medieval, Hector would not stay that way long.  It was later that Hector found a balance with metal and natural forms.  Many of his works are a mixture of structure taking on natural forms, such as curvilinear walls and mimicry of natural growth of a building.  Through, Guimard, we can see some of the first steps towards an architectural style of organic, amorphic thought.

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            Victor Horta, a Belgian architect of spotty success, also went to the Ecole de Beaux Arts, was influenced by Viollet-le-Duc, but did not follow Viollet’s example nearly as much as Guimard did.  Like Hector, Horta, worked with metal structure and natural forms, but where Guimard seemingly combined the two into a slightly organic form, Horta was entrenched in ornament and ornamentation.  Ornament, is defined as something that is added, while ornamentation is to give something useful a more pleasing form.  There seemed to be little ornament about Horta’s work, but plenty of ornamentation.  One need only look at the Hotel Tassel in Brussels.  The elegant railings, the natural forms of the columns, the grand design of the staircases and the reflection of natural form on the walls, carpeting and tapestries all played off one another creating an inner theme of the outer world.  Bringing nature into the interior via the artificial was Horta’s main work.  Oddly enough, Horta paid much less attention to the exterior of many of his buildings, sometimes seeming an afterthought.  Through Horta, we find some of the modern era’s sculpting of metal form into natural form and not just beams and bars.

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            Henry Van de Velde, a painter in France and a furniture designer, also finds his roots in Viollet-le-Duc.  Based on the Arts and Crafts Movement of England, created his own art movement with his friend, Willy Finch.  Henry fully recognized the worth of mechanized production, but warned against the effects of fashion on art and architecture.  He said that architecture needs to be, “a tradition of the eternally new.”  It should not seek be changed or repackaged, but always work in the form that it is in. Henry also made furniture that beautified structure.  It was his belief that structure formed ornament and that ornament was the product of beautiful structure.  Ornament and structure become one, almost completely indistinguishable. 

            Alan Colquhoun describes the Art Nouveau movement as a movement of “stress on individuality and originality, being transformed into repeatable forms based on vernacular and classical models…the concept of an uncoded, dynamic and instinctual art, based on empathy with nature, for which it was possible to prescribe but not lay down any unchanging and normative rules.”[1]  It is a very reasonable description of Art Nouveau as lain out by Van de Velde, Horta and Guimard.  All three had their precedents before them, and chose to, or not to, use them to varying degrees.  They used nature as part of their inspiration, had their rules of architecture and pieces (not all) of their work can be mass-produced.  Today, a good many designers look at nature and use natural forms in various parts of their designs.  Much to Van de Velde’s delight, architecture has not succumbed to fashion, but the two do play off on another every now and again. 

Colquhoun, Alan. Modern Architecture. New York; Oxford University Press. 2002.

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[1] Colquhoun, Alan. Modern Architecture. New York; Oxford University Press. 2002 p.33