Hotel Tassel, located on Rue Paul- Emile Janson 6, Brussels, Belgium, is one of the most famous Art Nouveau architectural buildings in Europe.

Victor Horta designed it, the Belgian architect who achieved great success as a precursor of Art Nouveau. After a short time, the style expanded internationally in architecture, fine art, and decorative art.

Victor Horta’s design had no reference in style, like other European architecture. In those days, the architects imitated the historical concepts and incorporated them with Gothic and Renaissance elements. Horta’s work was against the dominated eclectic Historicism that referred to the past.

The first architect that understood Victor Horta’s work was Hector Guimard, the architect of Paris Metro entrances. He declared Horta as the inventor of Art Nouveau and followed his style.

Hotel Tassel has an open floor plan. The central hall surrounded by the townhouse’s rooms includes the most amazing staircase in European architecture.

The stained glass windows beside the circular staircase on the top floor escalate the daylight. While the vegetal-designed stairway fences invigorate the interior and create openness, the elaborate mosaic flooring alongside the textured-floral wallpaper reflects pinkish-orange light colour on the stair surfaces.

Horta Museum, located in Rue Américaine 27, Brussels, Belgium was the former house and office (Maison & Atelier) of Victor Pierre Horta, the Belgian architect and almost be said the founder of the Art Nouveau movement.

For twenty years, the house intended for a double program, living and working and had served his designer Victor Horta. This building became his place of work and residence, with separated entrances for the house and the studio. Horta sold those two blocks of the building to two different new owners. But after another thirty years, the Commune de Saint-Giles bought the whole project from the previous residents and turned it into a museum. Horta Museum opened to the public in 1969 after the renovation. The restoration process had constantly been evolving. Later the authorities removed the lift installed in the sixties during the reconstruction, and the stairway turned into the previous state as it was once. It seems that after a hundred years, the landlord had returned to his home again.

The Belgians celebrated the work of its creator Victor Horta and dedicated the house to him. The building includes many documents, archives, and books of Horta and the designs of his contemporary colleagues who had contributed to Art Nouveau’s evolution.

Accessibility and openness enhanced free-flowing spaces that opposed the rigidness in the plan forming. Iron use supported the transparency effect in the building, and its innovative presence in combination with other new materials became one of the distinctive features of Art Nouveau architecture.
In this building, metalworking in windows created new possibilities for daylighting, for the lighter spaces and maximum visual comfort. Horta’s Museum also used ironwork in the curly details, the spiral staircase railings, the metal ceiling edges in the dining room, the lighting fixtures. The curved motifs inspired by flower and plant shapes were applied in metal arches outside and the balcony pillars.

One of the first examples of Art Nouveau architecture is Villa Majorelle. The awning by the porch, the wrought-iron entrance, and the front gate’s bell manifest the metalwork in the New Art style. These elaborated building elements had provided new possibilities for the building creators who displayed Art Nouveau’s beauty’s secrets in their design concept.

Villa Majorelle is located in Nancy, France, designed by Henri Savage, a young French architect in the early 20th century. Louis Majorelle, a French furniture designer and a first-class decorator of the Art Nouveau style, had commissioned the project for his work and his collaborations with the other artists of his time. The artistic magazines at that time had published articles about the charm of the Villa. They mentioned it as “A house made by an artist for an artist.”

The Villa Majorelle consists of three building blocks with different facades and individual roof shapes. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the French architectural theorist, provided a new definition to Art Nouveau, a description versus the historical Beaux-Arts style:” For each function its material and for each material its form and its ornament”. The interaction between the form and function in the three building blocks of Villa Majorelle represented their different purposes and distinct appearances.
The Interior has delicate parts and depicts the Art Nouveau style. In the vestibule inside the front part of the building laid a colourful mosaic floor. Outstanding decorative elements such as a carved wood panel, a decorative brass plate, a big arcuate mirror behind an umbrella rack made the space by the entrance exceptional.

One of the architectural characteristics in Art Nouveau style is the extensive use of the wrought iron, which emerged in the variants of metalwork in the buildings of Antoni Gaudí, a Catalan architect and the pioneer of Spanish Modernism.

The building gates of Gaudi’s work, such as the main entrance to the Finca Miralles, the main gate of Casa Batlló, are impressive wrought iron examples of the European metalwork designs. The gate in Casa Milà in La Pedrera assigned to Josep Maria Jujol, another Catalan architect who worked in many of Gaudi’s famous projects, is one of the most beautiful iron gates in the world.

Gaudi also could create other metal works such as brass and bronze works to produce decorative designs like doorknobs and handles. The integrated sculptural constructions depicted Gaudi’s technical capability. He discovered the metalsmith and smelting techniques to put the delicate metallic pieces together.

Gaudi guided the professional artisans to work on his projects and comply with his expectations. He optimized the production process for each piece, dipping the hands and fingers of his personnel in clay to form an ergonomic cast-made mould and to ensure the human physical aspects in production.

Architectural metalwork designed in the Art Nouveau style displayed bizarre and dynamic forms inspired by the sinuous curves of the natural shape of flowers, stems and blossoms. These shapes with the same elegance and delicate details in nature weren’t geometrical, parallel or symmetrical. They were smooth and flowing and formed organically as the natural figures of trees and bushes, mountains and clouds.

An essential characteristic of Art Nouveau was using new materials like metal in architecture and Interior design. Also, metalwork was associated significantly in producing design products in decorative art fields and applied art.

At the time of Art Nouveau, the architects used widely wrought Iron in buildings for producing fences, decorative balconies, stair railings, gateways, and metallic elements in interior work.

Following the artistic style that took the name “New Art, ” the designers produced highly qualified metallic products in architecture and sculpture and fabricated interior objects such as lampshades, kitchen fixtures, and knob handles.

From the beginning of the 19th century, wrought Iron was replaced by cast iron because of the lower production costs. As iron had become more common, it was used widely for cooking utensils, stoves, grates, locks, hardware, and other household uses.