Historical Timeline

of Architecture
Art Nouveau
1870 - 1900
The period from 1870 to 1900 covers the early period of the
German Second Reich and the Late Victorian phase of British
architecture. It is marked by a steady increase in the pace of
architectural change, a broadening of the range of structural
and stylistic possibilities, and the swan-song historicism,
trends which continue to develop after 1900.

Baroque

Gothic Revival

Classicism

Byzantine

Italian Renaissance

Arts and Crafts Movement

Art Nouveau
Arts and Crafts
movement
The Arts and Crafts movement, the
English aesthetic movement of the second half of the
19th century represented the beginning of a new
appreciation of the decorative
arts throughout Europe.

By 1860 a vocal minority had become profoundly

disturbed by the level to which style,
craftsmanship, and public taste had sunk in the wake
of the Industrial Revolution and its mass-produced
and banal decorative arts.

Among them was the English reformer, poet, and

designer William Morris, who, in 1861, founded a
firm of interior decorators and manufacturers—
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company (after 1875,
Morris and Company)—dedicated to recapturing the
spirit and quality of medieval craftsmanship.
Arts and Crafts
movement
Morris and his associates (among them the architect
Philip Webb and the painters Ford Madox Brown and Edward
Burne-Jones) produced
handcrafted metalwork, jewelry, wallpaper,
textiles, furniture, and books. The “firm” was run as an
artists’ collaborative, with the painters providing the
designs for skilled craftsmen to produce. To this date
many of their designs are copied by designers and
furniture manufacturers.

In the 1890s approval of the Arts and Crafts movement

widened, and the movement became diffused and less
specifically identified with a small group of people. Its
ideas spread to other countries and became identified
with the growing international interest in design,
specifically with Art Nouveau.
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau, is an ornamental style of art
that flourished between about 1890 and 1910
throughout Europe and the United States. Art
Nouveau is characterized by its use of a
long, sinuous, organic line and was employed
most often in architecture, interior
design, jewelry and glass design, posters,
and illustration. It was a deliberate attempt
to create a new style, free of the imitative
historicism that dominated much of 19th-
century art and design.

About this time the term Art Nouveau was

coined, in Belgium by the periodical L’Art
Moderne to describe the work of the artist
group Les Vingt and in Paris by S. Bing, who
named his gallery L’Art Nouveau. The style
was called Jugendstil in Germany,
Sezessionstil/Sezessione in Austria, Stile
Floreale (or Stile Liberty) in Italy, Le
Modernde Style in France, and Modernismo (or
Modernista) in Spain.
Art Nouveau
In England, the style’s
immediate precursors were
the Aestheticism of the
illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, who
depended heavily on the expressive
quality of organic line, and the Arts and
Crafts movement of William Morris, who
established the importance of a vital
style in the applied arts.

On the European continent, Art Nouveau

was influenced by experiments with
expressive lines by the painters’ Paul
Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Art Nouveau
The distinguishing ornamental characteristic of Art
Nouveau is its undulating asymmetrical line, often
taking the form of flower stalks and buds, vine
tendrils, insect wings, and other delicate and
sinuous natural objects; the line may be elegant and
graceful or infused with a powerfully rhythmic and
whiplike force. In graphic arts, the line
subordinates all other pictorial elements—form,
texture, space, and color—to its own decorative
effect.
In architecture and the other plastic arts, the whole
of the three-dimensional form becomes engulfed in the
organic, linear rhythm, creating a fusion between
structure and ornament.
Art Nouveau
Architecture particularly shows this synthesis
of ornament and structure; a liberal
combination of materials—ironwork, glass,
ceramic, and brickwork—was employed, for
example, in the creation of unified interiors
in which columns and beams became thick vines
with spreading tendrils and windows became both
openings for light and air and membranous
outgrowths of the organic whole.
This approach was directly opposed to the
traditional architectural values of reason and
clarity of structure.
Examples of Art
Nouveau Structures
School of Art, Glasgow
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
is the architect’s most famous work. The
main building was constructed between
1897 and 1899, and its long ashlar
façade is dominated by huge, north-
facing studio windows disposed with
subtle variations of rhythm around a
more obviously asymmetrical entrance
bay.

Thus, the direct expression of function

is combined with echoes of Scottish
vernacular architecture and influence of
the Arts and Crafts Movement.
School of Art, Glasgow
Entrance to the Place
des Abbesses metro
station, Paris, France
Designed by Hector Guimard
(1867-1942), it is very
similar to the other
surviving metro entrance
build by the artist at Porte
Dauphine (line 2). The
Abbesses entrance has a glass
roof with green wrought-iron
arches and amber lights.
Unlike the Porte Dauphine, it
does not have paneling.
Agoudas Hakehilos
Synagogue, Paris
One of the preeminent practitioners
of Art Nouveau in Paris was Hector
Guimard, who is perhaps best known
for his ironwork entrances to the
city’s Métro.
Situated in the Marais district,
Guimard’s Agoudas Hakehilos
Synagogue (also referred to as
Synagogue de la rue Pavée) was built
in 1913 and has an exterior motif
inspired by the Ten Commandments.
Hotel Tassel, No. 6, Rue Paul-
Emille-Janson, Brussels
Designed by Victor Horta, is often
regarded as the first complete
building in the fully-pledged Art
Nouveau style. It is a narrow-fronted
house and the main element of its
generally unobstructive façade is a
segmental oriel window with steel
lintels and mullions.
Inside, iron is extensively used to
open up the center of the deep
building, especially around the
stairs and internal conservatory
space.
Hotel Tassel, No. 6, Rue Paul-
Emille-Janson, Brussels

The tensile qualities of

iron are extensively
exploited for both
structure and decoration,
in free-flowing tendril-
like forms which are
echoed in the mosaic
floor and painted wall
surfaces.
Hotel Sovay, No. 224,
Avenue Louise

Designed by Victor Horta in

Brussels, in which the
façade is more plastic and
incorporates attenuated
iron columns.
Hotel Sovay, No. 224, Avenue Louise
Hotel van Eetvelde, No.
4, Avenue Palmerston
Designed by Victor Horta, where steel
stanchions are boldly employed externally.
In the latter, the interior is arranged
around a superb octagonal space which is
ringed with slender iron columns flowing
into elliptical arches and supporting a
shallow glass dome.
Hotel van Eetvelde, No. 4, Avenue Palmerston
The Old England
Building, Brussels
Designed by architect Paul Saintenoy,
the Old England building was
constructed in 1899 and is considered
one of Brussels’s Art Nouveau gems.
The former department store now houses
the Museum of Musical Instruments.
The Old England Building,
Brussels
Majolikahaus,
Vienna
An apartment building in Vienna,
the Majolikahaus designed by Otto
Wagner in the turn of the 20th
century emanates some of the most
classic details of the Art Nouveau
style and is decorated with vibrant
floral motifs.
In Vienna this was referred to as
the Secession style, with the same
connotations of Art Nouveau but in
a more specific context of their
country.
Majolikahaus, Vienna
An entire facade built of
small ceramic tiles, also
known as majolica, flow
into floral shapes as the
extend higher up the wall.

Other materials used in the

exterior finishing include
iron and wooden frames for
the windows, in a perimeter
block and infill building
type.
The Secession
Building, Vienna

Designed by architect Joseph Maria

Olbrich, the white cubic building
was constructed as an exhibition
hall for the artists and designers
of the Secessionist movement.
The structure, which opened in
1898, is topped with a distinctive
dome of 2,500 gilt wrought-iron
laurel leaves.
The Secession Building, Vienna
Albert Street, Riga
The Latvian city of Riga is
celebrated for its
astonishing amount of Art
Nouveau buildings. One of its
most prolific designers was
Russian-born Mikhail
Osipovich Eisenstein, who
devised a number of these
structures, including many of
the highly ornamented
apartment buildings on Albert
Street.
Albert Street, Riga
Antoni Gaudi
Antoni Gaudí, Catalan in full Antoni Gaudí i
Cornet, Spanish Antonio Gaudí y Cornet, (born
June 25, 1852, Reus, Spain—died June 10, 1926,
Barcelona), Catalan architect, whose distinctive
style is characterized by freedom of form,
voluptuous color and texture, and organic unity.

Gaudí worked almost entirely in or

near Barcelona. Much of his career was occupied
with the construction of the Expiatory Temple of
the Holy Family (Sagrada Familia), which was
unfinished at his death in 1926.
La Sagrada Familia
Designed by Antoni Gaudi, is still largely
unfinished and was seen by Gaudi as the work of
generations, a building which would evolve
painstakingly rather than a design which was fully
thought out from the beginning. The façade of the
Nativity has three steeply gabled, deeply recessed
porches, the outer ones corresponding to the
transept aisles, dominated by four skittle-shaped
openwork spires.
The porches are profusely ornamented with
naturalistic sculpture beneath stonework which
gives the impression of soft, melting snow.
La Sagrada Familia
The four fantastic towers are
capped with enormous faceted
finials, studded with broken
colored tiles. The nave was to
have had a double avenue of
columns, reaching up like sinewy
trees to sustain a shallow vault
pierced by round openings to
admit shafts of daylight.
The transept façade of the
Passion was begun in 1960 based
on Gaudi’s designs. Rising to
its portals are six leaning
props, as tense as ligaments.
Casa Mila
With its undulating façade and surrealist
sculptural roof, Antoni Gaudi’s Casa Milà
appears more organic than artificial, as if
it were carved straight from the ground.
Known as La Pedera, the quarry, the building
was inspired by the Modernista movement,
Spain’s version of Art Nouveau.

Constructed in 1912 for Roser Segimon and

Pere Milà, the building is divided into nine
levels: basement, ground floor, mezzanine,
main floor, four upper floors, and attic.
The ground floor acted as the garage, the
mezzanine for entry, the main floor for the
Milàs, and the upper floors for rent.
Casa Mila
The building surrounds two
interior courtyards, making for a
figure-eight shape in plan. On the
roof is the famous sculpture
terrace.
Practically, it houses skylights,
emergency stairs, fans, and
chimneys, but each function’s
envelope takes on an autonomously
sculptural quality that has become
a part of the building itself.
Casa Mila
Structurally, the building is divided
between structure and skin. The stone
façade has no load-bearing function.
Steel beams with the same curvature
support the facade’s weight by
attaching to the structure.

This allowed Gaudi to design the

façade without structural
constraints, and ultimately enabled
his conception of a continuously
curved façade.
Casa Mila
The structure holding up the
roof, too, allows for an organic
geometry. Composed of 270
parabolic brick arches of
varying height, the spine-like
rib structure creates a varied
topography above it.
Casa Mila
Formally, the façade can be read in
three sections: the street façade,
spanning the ground floor; the main
façade, including the main and upper
floors; and the roof structure, which
houses the attic and supports the roof
garden. Made of limestone blocks, the
curve of the main façade has a weighty
and textured quality organic.
Above it is a curvaceous mass on which
surrealist anthropomorphic sculptures
perch. Their presence contributes to the
almost flowing dynamism of the
building’s aesthetic.
Casa Mila
The Casa Milà, which was ultimately
a controversial building,
contributed greatly to the
Modernista movement and modernism.
It pushed formal boundaries of
rectilinearity and, as Gaudi
intentionally drew from natural and
organic forms for the building’s
shape, significantly inspired
practices of biomimicry.
Gaudi was a genius of structure and
form, and the Casa Milà attests to
that.
Casa Mila
Casa Batllo/Batlo
The inspiring imagination of Antoni
Gaudí undoubtedly reveals itself in
one of his most poetic and artistic
designs for a building, Casa Batlló.
His synthesis of animal shapes, vine-
like curves, hints of bone and
skeleton, and his use of lustrous
colored bits of glazed ceramic and
glass create a masterpiece that will
forever astonish its observers.

His style encompasses all that

defines Art Nouveau, a School of
French decorative artists from the
1890s who took influence from sinuous
shapes in plants and nature.
Casa Batllo/Batlo
He explored his interests in
flowing shapes, patterns, and
colors in the Casa Batlló,
which was designed for the
wealthy cotton baron Josep
Batlló as a jolting
contradiction to the rigid
forms that surround it.
Casa Batllo/Batlo
The front facade reveals striking
textures, colors, and imagery that work
together to conjure thoughts of
fairytales and phantasmal dreams. The
larger sculptural pieces that create the
boundaries of the balconies and that
frame the entrance resemble bones,
suggesting a septum, eyebrows, or
clavicles, which keep to the
anthropomorphic tone.

As eyes wander up to the top of Casa

Batlló, they are greeted by the
dominating reptilian surface of the roof.
Casa Batllo/Batlo
Casa Batllo/Batlo
Casa Batllo/Batlo
The End