ARCHITECTURE

VAN DE VELDE.


Through architectural magazines and exhibitions. Mackintosh's work came to be widely known abroad. Its structural clarity and force had a profound effect on one of the leaders of Art Nouveau in Belgium, Henri Van de Velde (1863-1957). He began as a Divisionist painter but, under the influence of William Morris, became a designer of posters, furniture, silverware, and glass. Then, after 1900, he worked mainly as an architect. Van de Velde founded the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts in Germany, which became famous after World War I as the Bauhaus. His most ambitious building (figs. 1020 and 1021), the theater he designed in Cologne for an exhibition sponsored by the Werkbund (arts and crafts association) in 1914, makes a telling contrast with the Paris Opera (figs. 934 and 935). Whereas the older building tries to evoke the splendors of the Louvre Palace, Van de Velde's exterior is a tightly stretched, unadorned "skin" that covers—and reveals—the individual units of which the internal space is composed. So vast is the difference that it seems almost incredible that the Opera should have been completed only 40 years before.

1020. Henri Van de Velde. Theater, Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne (destroyed). 1914
1021. Plan of the Theater, Werkbund Exhibition

Henry van de Velde Henry van de Velde, in full Henry Clemens Van De Velde (born April 3, 1863, Antwerp, Belg.—died Oct. 25, 1957, Zürich, Switz.), Belgian architect and teacher who ranks with his compatriot Victor Horta as an originator of the Art Nouveau style, characterized by long sinuous lines derived from naturalistic forms. By designing furniture and interiors for the Paris art galleries of Samuel Bing in 1896, van de Velde was responsible for bringing the Art Nouveau style to Paris. Van de Velde’s most vital contributions to modern design were made as a teacher in Germany, where his name became known through the exhibition of furnished interiors at Dresden in 1897. In 1902 he went to Weimar as artistic adviser to the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar. There, influenced by the philosophy of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, he reorganized the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts-and-Crafts School) and the academy of fine art and thus laid the foundations for Walter Gropius’ amalgamation of the two bodies into the Bauhaus in 1919. Like the progressive German designers at the time, van de Velde was connected with the Deutscher Werkbund, and he designed the theatre for the Werkbund Exposition in Cologne in 1914. Despite official appointments in Belgium, van de Velde after 1918 made no further contributions to architecture or design. A valuable extract from his Memoirs (1891–1901) was published in the Architectural Review, 112:143–148 (September 1952). Encyclopædia Britannica

Henri Van de Velde, Karl Gerard. Folkwang Museum in Hagen, Germany, 1897-1902
Hall with view to the staircase, 1901

Henri Van de Velde.
Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar, Germany,
1904-1911

Severe, factory-type studio windows with exposed steel lintels dominate the main facade. The brickwork between forms powerful pillars which end abruptly and without transition to the sloping roof. In the central projection they extend above the height of the eaves; where an architrave might be expected, there is simply an empty space.

Henri Van de Velde. Villa Hohenhof in Hagen (Westphalia) in Germany
 

Henri Van de Velde. Schulenburgsche Villa in Gera

Charles F. A. Voysey
"Moorcrag", House for J. W. Buckley,
Gillhead/Cumbria, England, 1898-1899

A. Dunbar Smith and Cecil C. Brewer "Passmore Edwards Settlement" in London,
1896-1897

Bernhard Sehring and L. Lochmann
Tietz Department Store in Berlin, 1899-1900

The huge shop windows, 25 x 18 metres respectively, ran through all the floors. The supporting pillars were recessed two metres behind this front. A glass globe with a diameter of over four metres was lit up from within at night.

Alfred Messel
Wertheim Department Store in Berlin, 1896

The tall train facade, articulated by slender granite columns, indicates a classical height development; projecting shop windows at its base, tall areas of finely-partitioned glazing above these, and neo-Gothic bronze tracery as concluding frieze. The three central boys were decorated with elliptical oculi, phials and other sculptural historical ornaments. This "artistic" approach tî the entrance area was to recompense the unusually large volume of glass.