L'Art Nouveau à Bruxelles

We've had a busy week, so I have had little time to blog. In the last blog entry I did mention Emily's visit, but forgot to explain what we did the first day she was here. She was going to go with me, but preferred to rest and recuperate from her trip, so she watched the kids and Maggie came instead, and we decided to go on a walking tour of Brussels Art-Nouveau houses, in the communes Ixelles and Saint-Gilles.

This tour started at the Horta Museum, the former home and studio of Victor Horta, a striking example of Art-Nouveau architecture and interior design, and ended at another building (the hotel pictured at left). It was very enlightening, and very good exercise. I can see why people here can eat and drink the food that they do, yet still remain slim; every Saturday and Sunday you see people outside, visiting museum, going for promenades, cycling, rollerblading and running, and of course taking the walking tours. It seems a very active culture, without being hurried about it. Our ankles and knees are already toughening up, and the uneven cobblestones don't seem to bother me as much as they did when I first visited.

The art-nouveau architects such as Victor Horta, or Paul Hankar were extremely influential around the turn of the 19th-20th century, and they used a number of distinctive decorative techniques, among them mosaics, ironwork, glass (in distinctive window shapes) and something else that I hadn't heard of before, called sgrafittes (or in italian, sgraffitto). This is a technique of applying a base of black plaster to the wall, and after letting it dry applying further successive coats in differing colours, with the lightest coat on the top. Then you carve into the plaster, revealing various colours depending on how deep you cut. It's a quite distinctive and apparently durable way of decorating the outside of a building; you can see some quite beautiful sgrafittes in the picture at the top of this page, a photo of the Hôtel Ciamberlani, built in 1897.

Maggie and I both have soft spots for this art form, one that was extremely influential, and we first discovered through the building, furniture and pottery of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (in Scotland), and the poster art of Alphonse Much (a Czech artist). However the echoes of Art Nouveau exist even now: in the recent film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings; Bilbo's house, and Elrond's house in particular are very art nouveau in design, and there is something magical and organic about them.