V.

Art Nouveau and Related Movements

Art Nouveau, which flourished in Europe between 1890 and 1910, was one of the earliest (and shortest-lived) efforts to develop an original style for the modern age. Art nouveau artists and designers transformed modern industrial materials such as iron and glass into graceful, curving forms often drawn from nature, though with playful elements of fantasy. In contrast to both Perret and the architects of the Chicago School, art nouveau designers were interested in architecture as a form of stylistic expression rather than as a structural system.

In the three centers of art nouveau—Barcelona, Spain; Brussels, Belgium; and Paris, France—architects struggled to define a style with distinctly local characteristics. In Barcelona, one of the most ambitious projects of architect Antoni Guadí was the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Família (Church of the Holy Family, 1883-1929, 1979 to present). Gaudí turned to nature for a rich variety of animal and plant forms to decorate the towering façades of the Sagrada Família. He also used natural forms structurally: columns shaped like bones, undulating walls in brick, a roofline resembling the profile of an armadillo. His wide use of ceramic tile, a local building material, gave color and texture to his designs. The deeply personal nature of his fanciful designs meant that no school developed to follow him. Much more effective in generating a following was architect Victor Horta of Brussels.

Like Gaudí, Horta reacted against prevailing styles with an architecture that responded to local traditions and materials, although Horta transformed iron and glass as well as Belgian brick into slender, graceful forms inspired by flowers. Among his most influential designs was the Hôtel Tassel (1892-1893) in Brussels, a three-story house in which thin iron columns flow into stylized vines and serve both as structural and as decorative elements. The creation of these organic forms depended not on mass-production or modern machines, but on craftsmanship, thereby restoring to architecture what many feared was being lost to an increasingly technological engineering mentality. Horta’s flowing lines became the hallmark of art nouveau and were rendered by others in iron, glass, and plaster as well as in graphic design. In Paris, Hector Guimard produced entrances for the Métro subway system (1899-1904), rendering fanciful plantlike forms in iron and glass.

As art nouveau’s influence spread throughout Europe and North America, regional variations developed: stile Liberty in Italy, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, and modernisme in Spain. Among the major achievements of these art nouveau offshoots were the Elvira Photo Studio (1896-1897) in Munich, Germany, by German architect August Endell; and the Stadtbahn (city railway system, 1894-1899) in Vienna, Austria, by Otto Wagner. Perhaps the greatest of these achievements is the Willow Tea Room (1903-1904) in Glasgow, Scotland, designed with sinuous, willowy lines by Scottish architect and graphic designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.