he Brussels townhouse that Víctor Horta built for Émile Tassel is often called the first full expression of Art Nouveau. It was completed in 1893.
Tassel was a professor of geometry and a friend of the architect. A collector of Japanese prints and a music enthusiast, he entertained often. Like most of Horta's clients in the 1890s, he was also a member of a young, politically progressive middle class, eager to demonstrate its modernity.
Tassel's house illustrates many of the elements that went into making Art Nouveau: an alternate "take" on historical styles, an arts and crafts sensibility, and the modern materials of iron and glass. Horta himself did not see the building as a total break with the past. The stone exterior includes the consoles, moldings, and columns of classical architecture. But the columns are iron, not stone. The building had a smooth, fluid façade, unlike the carefully articulated planes of true classical buildings.
Walking inside, a visitor would sense a different mood: the delicacy and curving "femininity" of a rococo drawing room. Yet it was alloyed by modernity in the choice of materials and their interpretation as plant forms. From a calyxlike capital, the iron columns sprout slender iron strips to support the floor above. No attempt is made to disguise this material -the rivets are clearly visible, decorative in their own right. They emphasize rather than conceal the structure. Yet Horta turned to wrought-iron craftsmen to fashion the industrially laminated material.
Horta's organization of interior space was innovative. Rooms were filled with natural light (from two light wells), and the floor plan had a fluid, asymmetrical flow. To achieve an integrated whole, Horta also insisted on designing all elements of the interior decoration: the stair rail and painted wall decoration, the mosaic flooring, electric light fixtures, even the door handles are elements of a total design. Such a complete visual environment, or ‘Gesamtkunstwerk', was thoroughly modern in its desire to place modern man in a fully modern setting.
