Victor Horta: Architectural Innovator of Art Nouveau

 In this blog, I have written about painters, sculptors, and printers but little about architects. It was not an oversight. It was because many avant garde architects such as Gaudi and Gehring have been widely recognized. Then, I came across Victor Horta (1861-1947) who has been called, "the key European Art Nouveau Architect." 

 

Born in Ghent, Belgium, Horta was educated in music, art, design and architecture. Early in his career, he began to work with iron and glass - often thought of as hard and angular materials. Horta designs wove them into sinuous shapes for both the exterior and interior. 

 

 

He designed a few houses, but quickly moved on to designing public buildings. His signature design was the whiplash curves which you can see in the photos here. These have a certain feeling of plant tendrils and became part of the description of the Art Nouveau period. 

  After WWI, Horta moved from the curving, sweeping style to a more geometrical one. This evolution would lead to Art Deco and Modernism. However, modernist felt no connection to Horta's Art Nouveau style and several of his buildings were demolished in the 1960s. 

 

UNESCO stepped in and preserved some of Horta's houses and buildings as World Heritage Sites. We are lucky to have these beautiful designs.

 

Here's more examples of the detail in Horta's works:

 

 

Maya Lin: What's She Been Doing?

Maya Lin was a young student at Yale when she won the competition for the Viet Nam Memorial in 1981. She received lots of accolades. She was even the subject of an award-winning documentary.

Hard to believe, but it's been 31 years since Lin, as an undergraduate, created the memorial. She is now a 52 year-old wife and mother.

What's she been designing since the Viet Nam Memorial? Short answer: "a lot!" Below are just a few of the highlights. (click on images to enlarge)

Besides the well-known Viet Nam Memorial, Lin created the Civil Rights Memorial in tribute to those who put their courage (and lives)  up for what they believed.

Lin also designed the wonderful timepiece at the Penn Station's ceiling in New York City titled "Eclipsed Time."

Over the years, Lin has created more and more environmental art. Sometimes her creations involved changing the landscape such as "Storm King Wave Field" for  the Storm King Art Center, New York, which had been an open gravel pit.

Lin not only formed outdoors environmental art, but also a traveling museum exhibit titled, "Systematic Landscapes," tracing the wave lengths of the ocean and topography of Earth in undulating shapes.  Quoting from "Boundaries," her autobiographical book, "My affinity has always been toward sculpting the earth. This impulse has shaped my entire body of work."

Today, Lin's latest oeuvre is titled, "What is Missing?" The subject is conservation about those beings who are at risk of extinction.  There's a website http://whatismissing.net/#/home , (maybe slow to load, but very well done)

 a traveling exhibit,

a sculpture at the California Academy of Sciences titled, "Listening Cone," which houses a 20-miute video,

And that, Dear Reader,  is a brief look at what Maya Lin has been doing over these 31 years. Pretty impressive, yes?

Victor Horta and the Whiplash Curve

In this blog, I have written about painters, sculptors, and printers but never about architects. It was not an oversight. It was because many avant garde architects such as Gaudi and Gehring have been widely recognized. Then, I came across Victor Horta (1861-1947) who has been called, "the key European Art Nouveau Architect."

Born in Ghent, Belgium, Horta was educated in music, art, design and architecture. Early in his career, he began to work with iron and glass - often thought of as hard and angular materials. Horta designs wove them into sinuous shapes for both the exterior and interior.

He designed a few houses, but quickly moved on to designing public buildings. His signature design was the whiplash curves which you can see in the photos here. These have a certain feeling of plant tendrils and became part of

the description of the Art Nouveau period.

After WWI, Horta moved from the curving, sweeping style to a more geometrical one. This evolution would lead to Art Deco and Modernism. However, modernist felt no connection to Horta's Art Nouveau style. Several buildings were demolished in the 1960s.

UNESCO stepped in and preserved some of Horta's houses and buildings as World Heritage Sites. We are lucky to have these beautiful designs. So, if you're ever in Belgium...