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.

The Joke Goes Like This

The joke goes something like: Name five famous Belgians – and of course no one can. It’s supposed to prove that Belgium is boring.

It’s not true – at least as far as Brussels is concerned. After spending a week there, we suspect that Belgium has just had bad PR – and that the Belgians don’t mind that at all. In fact we heard that they kind of like being overlooked so they can get on with the business of living.

Getting There

Brussels: the capital of Belgium. It’s on the same latitude as Brighton on the south coast of England, just a hop, skip, and a jump across the channel – or under the Channel via Eurostar, with a route that terminates at Gare du Midi in the middle of the city.

Of course from Edinburgh where we live, it was cheaper to fly – and we had lots of Avios airmiles to our credit, which made it even cheaper.

Brussels – Isn’t That Where The European Parliament Is?

Yes, the seat or permanent home of the European Union Parliament is in Brussels, but it wasn’t fixed until quite recently in the history of the European Union.

For years there was a provisional arrangement under which the Parliament was located in Strasbourg, while the European Commission (the executive body of the EU) and the Council (the heads of state of the member countries) had their seats in Brussels.

Then in 1985 the Parliament had a second chamber built in Brussels so it would be near the Commission and the Council.

1997 Treaty Of Amsterdam

That ‘temporary’ situation was regularised by the 1997 Treaty Of Amsterdam under which Brussels became the workaday home of the Parliament under an arrangement whereby the Parliament also kept its seat in Strasbourg and would hold twelve sessions a year there.

Apparently, there is still some ill feeling between certain of the member states about the location of the Parliament in Belgium.

For Brussels it means that there is an EU quarter with new glass, steel, and concrete buildings – stretching onwards and upwards for block after block.

The Grande Place

Lined all around with such fine buildings, the Grand Place or main square in Brussels doesn’t disappoint. It is crammed to the corners with gold-leaf covered buildings. Take away the tourists and the odd sign here and there, and we could be back in the heyday of Flemish ascendance.

Belgian Independence

Belgium has only been independent since 1830, when it seceded from the Netherlands. There’s a painting in the Royal Art Museum of the moment of revolution in July 1830.

The painting shows a skirmish in the park opposite the museum when crowd in the street, protesting unfair representation in the Netherlands parliament, met with the well-to-do who were leaving the opera.

The theme of the opera performance was the overthrow of a regime, so everyone was in similar mood.

The Netherlands took the kind course of granting the Belgians’ wish to secede and the secession passed peacefully enough with a guiding hand from the French.

Historically, it was out of this mix that Belgium gained its status as a neutral country, the invasion of which by Germany was the match that lit the fuse that brought Britain into the First World War.

Musee Royaux Des Beaux-Arts

The rooms of the Musee Royaux Des Beaux-Arts (Royal Art Museum) that house modern art are closed for renovations (due to reopen next year).

The earlier art that is on show is wonderful, with several Breugels, Bosch, and at least one Rembrandt.

The outside of the building has seen better days, and the fact that it isn’t in tip-top condition may say something about how much money there is (or isn’t) floating around in the public coffers.

We did hear that a lot of money comes into Brussels because of the European Union having its institutions here. But for a capital city the state of its pavements (sidewalks) is pretty bad, with small up-tipped paving stones everywhere. (Not that we’re grumbling or grouchy or anything…)

The Comic Strip Center

The photo below is of the foyer of the Comic Strip Center, which is located in the former Waucquez Warehouse, an Art Nouveau building designed by the architect Victor Horta (1906).

Typical of Horta’s style, the structural elements are left on show rather than being hidden behind decoration. In fact, the decoration is purposely made to seem like decoration.

You can see this in the closeup in the second photo below, with the comparison between the stubby square sections of raw steel above the ‘classical Greek’ decoration that sits in ‘mid air’ partway up the columns.

Boule & Bill

A red Citroen 2CV features in the comic strip Boule & Bill. It’s the invention of the artist Jean Roba, who died in 2006 and who has a small room in the Comic Strip Center dedicated to his work.

The car in the foyer of the museum was given to Roba when he published his 1000th Boule & Bill cartoon, and it has been signed and dedicated with sketches by many popular and pioneer artists who were friends with Roba.

The staff at the museum explained all this when they kindly emailed this page from the cartoon strip to us.

A Load Of Waffles

And now to the most important part of Belgian culture, outranking even Belgian chocolate (which is world famous): Namely waffles.

You will find waffles in any small food shop, in little kiosks, and you will definitely find them in the screaming yellow vans strategically located in busy squares around the city.

Doused in chocolate, covered in cream, or just plain – take your pick.

Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, delicious.

Trams

We took a tram ride to a meeting one evening – on #92 out to the terminus stop at Fort Jaco. When we finished our meeting, we got back on the tram and waited.

The driver came on board and before settling into his seat to begin the journey, he started to pour sand into little metal boxes at strategic points along the inside of the tram.

We asked him what he was doing and he said it was for the brakes. How interesting. How seemingly old fashioned. We guess the dribble of sand helps to make contact between the metal wheels and the metal tramlines.

Trams are a big feature in Brussels. They glide along while people dodge across the tramlines in front of them.

People have also made a speciality of deciding at the last moment that a different tram is the one for them – and they sprint to another stop to catch an approaching tram.

It was quite disconcerting the first time we saw it, with people suddenly running away from the tram stop at which we were standing.

One a more decorative note, even when the trams are nowhere is sight there is a tracery of overhead tram wires to set off the scene.

A Final Word On The Grand Place

The Grand Place is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and here is a photo of one of the buildings that flank it. It is the town hall, started in 1402 and completed in 1410.

It was here that the provisional government met in 1830 to set the seal on the secession from the Netherlands and the founding of the country of Belgium.

Look out for Part II of this look at Brussels, when we will give the lowdown on the Horta House – the wonderfully intact and renovated Art Nouveau house that Victor Horta designed.