Behind The Photographs

Victor Horta was a Belgian architect and a leading figure in the Art Nouveau (New Art) movement – a movement that mushroomed all over Europe starting in the 1890s.

The Horta museum in Brussels is housed in what was Horta’s house and studio, which he designed in the Art Nouveau style.

He had the house built over a three-year period – from 1898-1901 – and he lived and worked there until 1915.

He then sold the house and the studio separately in 1919 and they were eventually bought by the city of Brussels in order to create the museum.

Placing the events in history, Horta had the house built at a time when the whole of Europe was enjoying the flowering of Art Nouveau, and he sold the house a year after the end of a world war that left bits of splintered bone over half of Belgium.

Well, whatever I might try to read into the dates, Wikipedia tells me that Horta…

…left Belgium for London in February 1915 and attended the Town Planning Conference on the Reconstruction of Belgium, organised by the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association.

Unable to return to Belgium due to the war, at the end of the year he decided to go to the United States, where he gave a number of lectures at universities including Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Smith College, Wellesley College and Yale and, in 1917, became Professor of Architecture at George Washington University, and Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lecturer.

Inside The Horta House

The house is built over several floors, and there is a wonderful staircase which you can see in this photograph, that winds itself up to the top of the house. It feels light and delicate.

There are lots of little landings leading off this way and that – giving the house a free-spirited, whimsical feel. It is reminiscent of Escher – as though the staircase would wind itself up and off to somewhere impossible.

Organic Goes Out Of Fashion

After the First World War the curvy, organic shapes that typify Art Nouveau were out of fashion. Taste moved to something more straight-lined and geometric.

When I think of that, it makes me wonder whether it was a just simple change of taste and fashion, or whether it was the all-too-organic war that people wanted to forget and the technological dream of the future that they wanted to embrace?

Whatever the spur to the change of taste, Horta designed the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in the 1920s in a much straighter, more geometric style.

We went to the Palais des Beaux-Arts (known locally as BoAz) for an exhibition of the drawings of Watteau, and while we there I took the opportunity to take a couple of photos of the interior – not very exciting, but the light was low.

I liked the entrance to the toilets, and I would have grabbed a shot of the urinals in the gents if I had had more time to prop the camera somewhere. It’s rare that I am struck by the beauty of a urinal, but the way the stall curved around a wall that sloped gently downward was very sympathetically done.

The main hall (which I didn’t photograph) was something else again – very spare and big and empty, and a bit unloved.

The Exterior Of BoAz

The exterior of the Palais des Beaux-Arts is in the same pale stone that features in quite a number of buildings in Brussels – and very strong and irresistible it looks. I can’t help but think the appeal had something to do with a psychological wish to build something that looked as though it could resist destruction.

Here is a shot of the building and also a close-up of the balcony.

Getting To The Museum

It’s easy to get to the Horta Museum by public transport. It’s in the Ixelles section, south east of the centre of the city.

Take tram #92 from Place Stephanie and get off as near as you can to Avenue Americain, which is a street to the left of the tram route.

The Horta House is down the street on the right and easily recognised by the yellow metal struts of the balconies.

It’s open from 2pm to 5pm. Expect to wait in a queue (line) along the street because the house is popular and only 45 people are allowed inside at any one time.

The reason they only allow 45 people at one time into the building is because of the strength (the possible lack thereof) of the building. However, when we were climbing the stairs to the upper floors I gave the bannister a thump to see whether it would shiver or flex.

The bannister did not give an inch and the stairs themselves felt rock-solid despite the numbers tramping up and down them.

So given the very open, light, and airy feel to the building – and the thin metal struts that make up the structure – I would say that Victor Horta was a first class engineer as well as a wonderful architect.

You have to park all your belongings when you get into the museum – no bags, no outer coats, no umbrellas. The cloakroom has a haphazard arrangement for keeping different people’s bags separate from their neighbour’s bags.

The man who took our bags pushed them into a cubbyhole and separated them from someone else’s bags by cramming a piece of paper between the two. It worked out OK though, and we got our bags back at the end of our visit.

Brussels – Hiding In Plain Sight

This is the second of two articles. Here is the link to our article entitled Brussels – Hiding In Plain Sight.

A couple of days ago I was looking through the photos from our visit to the Isle of May last year when I decided to take a look at a couple of shots that I had not processed.

They were photos of razorbills. I had to photograph them against the backdrop of the open sea, which meant that the camera set the scene optimally but the birds looked very underexposed and the faces were just dark shadows.

If I had set exposure compensation – see my article on exposure compensation here – I might have produced a better RAW image. Be that as it may, I recall that I opened the images up in Photoshop, but I don’t think I tried very hard to optimise them.

Enter Photoshop CS6

I opened the images up again a couple of days ago, and they were easy to process. Perhaps it is because I have an updated version of Photoshop. Certainly, the tools in Adobe Camera Raw are very good for optimising images.

Seeing the razorbill’s beak close up makes me realise that they have a somewhat similar appearance to the puffin’s beak, with the markings on the side of the upper part of the beak.

It’s not so surprising because they are both part of the same family of auks.

Razorbills and puffins don’t compete for the same food, however. Puffins eat sand eels, as you can see in the photo below – while Razorbills (which are quite a bit bigger) eat juvenile cod, sprats, and herring.

You will find these and more than fifty other images of birds in our Bird Ecards.

Fairy Tale London

Ah, the beautiful buildings of fairy tale London. Aren’t they terrific?

This photo shows the spires of the renovated St. Pancras Station peeping out from behind the forecourt of the recently renovated British Library in London.

St. Pancras Station was famously saved from demolition by the poet John Betjaman, who mounted a campaign to save the station.

His statue stands on the upper floor of the station, where he is gazing up at the roof – although of course what was really intended to be conveyed was of him gazing up at the outside of the station.

John Betjaman had strong views on architecture – particularly what he saw as the bad architecture that was intent on destroying English towns.

Shortly before the Second World War, he wrote a poem about the English town of Slough:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

To explain:’Ninety seven down’ refers to £97.00 deposit to buy a property with a mortgage and, ‘half a crown’ was a coin whose value was one eighth of a pound.

Betjaman was criticised heavily at the time for even talking about the possibility of bombs falling on an English town (something that became all too true just a couple of years later).

He was also criticised for what was seen as his upper-class attitude that wanted to preserve England as some pleasant idyll that in reality meant hardship for the ordinary man in the street.

I think he just knew terrible architecture when he saw it.

The History Of Mr. Polly

The mention in the poem of the poor young men who “daren’t look up and see the stars” reminds me of the theme of the novel ‘The History of Mr. Polly’ written by H.G. Wells in 1910.

In it, the hero – a poor downtrodden wisp of a man – escapes a life of drudgery and finds his own tune to which to dance through life.

In some ways it all seems so long ago. In modern England, everyone is free, free to buy what they want and to behave as they want. All the strictures of class divisions seem laughable – but they should are still there.

The Man Who Could Work Miracles

For another look at H.G. Wells’ views on the way the world works, there is the story of what happens when the gods grant a draper’s assistant unlimited power.

Rather, they grant George McWhirter Fotheringay unlimited power except power over the human heart.

He starts out bemused by his powers and is given advice from every quarter. In the end he decides for himself what to do with his powers.

Here’s a full-length film version of his The Man Who Could Work Miracles – unfortunately missing the last half minute or so when the gods talk about what has happened…

Look Out, We’re Surrounded

Two and a half miles (4km) from St. Pancras station, lies Bishopsgate – a street close to the heart of the financial district of the city.

I sipped my coffee on a terrace cafe and looked out at the old buildings.

For a while I was blind to what was behind them.

Then I saw, from under the lip of the large umbrella over my table – like something from the War Of The Worlds – a ring of glass and steel skyscrapers surrounding the old buildings.

On the left is the ‘Gherkin’ building, where council workers work. But for the most part the buildings house businesses, like the Heron Tower that you can also see in the photo and again in the photo below.

Do you feel dwarfed and rebuffed by these sleek modern buildings?

Tamara and I do. It’s not that we dislike modern glass and steel buildings per se, but the way the new buildings dwarf the old is unappealing.

We like buildings on a human scale.

Just because people can build huge buildings, doesn’t mean people have to build huge buildings, does it?

We modern humans may be taller than our ancestors, but we are not that much taller or bigger, are we?

Tamara and I feel the same way about large, empty city squares surrounded by monolithic buildings.

When they are filled with people, they can be lovely. But take away the crowds and large empty squares seem to be products of an idea that has forgotten its human roots.

Of Course, There Are Fine Buildings Too

There are fine buildings and other fine structures in London, of course, and some fine views. And some of them are large structures – but the detail seems to make them more accessible, less like glass mountains.

Here are views of the Thames that I shot for the article Six Angles To Shoot London.

For more images of urban appeal, take a look at these ecards featuring city buildings and urban landscapes that we have photographed on our travels around the world.
From England’s Stonehenge in Wiltshire and the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford to France’s bookseller’s stall on the banks of the Seine in Paris, to Israel and a walkway to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; they are all here – captured as images for our ecards.