Schools of Art Nouveau Architecture

Every new turn, every new direction in world architecture is bound up with milestones in the history of human society and its progressive achievements. The Art Nouveau style emerged at the end of the nineteenth century against the backdrop of the industrial boom and became the embodiment of its era.

Art Nouveau — called by a different name in each country — was embraced and realized in architecture all over the world. It absorbed the best features of Eastern exoticism and is rich in elements of the Rococo and the Gothic. Art Nouveau easily supplanted its predecessor, Eclecticism, integrating organically with the new possibilities of construction. The use of stone, glass, and metal helped create flowing lines and whimsical arabesques.

Characteristics of the Art Nouveau style

Art Nouveau is marked by a great variety of distinctive elements, the result of a synthesis of several fields of art — painting, sculpture, architecture, and the applied arts.

The buildings are striking for their visual lightness and their unusual, asymmetrical shapes. The interiors are spacious, with almost no straight lines or corners.
The structures are built of light aluminum and traditional reinforced concrete, with spans of the arched, cable-stayed, and girder types.
The prevailing color scheme is pastel, though metallic, silver, and fluorescent paints are also used. There is an abundance of plant ornament.
The doors are often offset from the center of the building, and they come in varied types — from revolving to telescopic.
The windows are large, sometimes filling an entire wall. Their mechanisms may be casement, top-hung, pivoting, or sliding.
The lines of the forms are free, recalling the natural shapes found in nature. Each side of the building offers a good vantage point, where the decor and facade appear in a different light, while the overall picture is stunningly harmonious.

Vegetal Art Nouveau Patterns — Off-center doors, soft, flowing lines, and a plant motif.

Belgian school of Art Nouveau

The widely acknowledged pioneer of Art Nouveau was Victor Horta, the Belgian architect who first introduced the use of glass and metal in building — new materials at the time. Horta's creations are easily recognized by their distinctive look: metal frameworks of fanciful plant forms, large areas of glazing, and meticulous attention to the smallest details, down to the door handles, all brought into a single style. In 1893, Horta designed the first Art Nouveau building in the world, the Hôtel Tassel. But the most interesting in terms of their innovative approach are his department store buildings, such as the "Innovation" store in Brussels, built by Horta in 1901. In these buildings the facades are a continuous glazed surface resting on metal frames.

Tassel House — The Hôtel Tassel is considered the first Art Nouveau building in the world. Large windows, softened corners, and the characteristic cyclamen-stem pattern on the wrought iron grille.

The Solvay House — The Hôtel Solvay — its different angles reveal a coherent harmony.

FRENCH SCHOOL

A little later, after encountering the work of Victor Horta on a trip to Brussels, the Frenchman Hector Guimard began to work in the Art Nouveau style. Under the powerful impression of Horta's graceful, airy buildings, Guimard built the world-famous Castel Béranger, or Castel Dérangé ("the deranged castle"), as Guimard's contemporaries called it. It has all the classic features of Art Nouveau: an asymmetrical shape, an unusual arrangement of windows (set on the diagonal), balconies, portals, an uneven masonry surface combined with brick, and bright stained glass in the windows.

Castel Beranger — Castel Béranger, the "house of madmen." Unlike a Palladian building, it looks different on each side.

The Paris Metro — Paris has quite a few buildings by the French founder of Art Nouveau; in particular, the public enjoys the sight of his cast-iron Metro pavilions every day, recognized as masterpieces of plastic form.

THE SPANISH SCHOOL

The Spanish school is marked by originality, finding its most harmonious forms in Gothic and Islamic architecture.

Antoni Gaudí's structures fit so naturally into their surroundings that one has the sense they belong there. The architect's extraordinary talent and imagination gave rise to some two dozen amazing projects. Decorative elements are the main distinguishing feature of his style. Casa Vicens, a house that seems to have stepped from the pages of a children's fairy tale, was built using polychrome ceramic effects: the asymmetry of the facade, the broken roofline, and rich ornamentation. The mansion El Capricho is no less original, and the fanciful Park Güell is a whole series of unique structures that seem to have grown out of the ground — the snaking "endless bench" and columns like trees.

Casa Vicens is a fairy-tale castle, bright and colorful.

RUSSIAN SCHOOL

Art Nouveau in the Russian manner combines all the characteristic features of the style with folk tradition. The designs draw on the features of Byzantine churches and 17th-century boyar mansions: openwork compositions with many arched elements, high spans, three-dimensional interior spaces, and large stained-glass windows. The decoration features female figures with vines twined in their hair, mosaic images, and plant forms.

Morozov Mansion — A. Morozov's Mansion — Moscow, Vozdvizhenka.

Moscow has many buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that were built in the Art Nouveau style. The proponents of the style were the architects F. O. Shekhtel, W. F. Walcot, F. F. Voskresensky, A. U. Zelenko, and others.

The Otto List mansion, built by Lev Kekushev in 1899, is notable for its asymmetrical shape, its windows of different sizes and appearances, the rich and expressive majolica mosaic over the arched entrance, and the small square loggia with a column above the first floor at the corner of the building.

List's Mansion — The List mansion. Kekushev originally built it for himself.

On Prechistenka stands the Isakov apartment building, also built by Kekushev. It is a charming structure. The house was built for the merchant Isakov in the early 20th century, and although it is large in scale, it has an amazing openwork lightness. The French style is evident in the design: the windows vary not only in size and shape but also in their framing; on the central axis is a balcony with openwork wrought iron grilles, and the edges are decorated with bay windows. The brick facade has rounded corners, a frieze of patterned stucco runs along the upper part, and the sides are decorated with female figures.

Isakov House — The Isakov house, intended for the most affluent residents.

In St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century, a new generation of the style emerged — "Northern Art Nouveau," whose most important feature was the use of marble and granite to finish facades in combination with metal and wood elements.

Kurlina's House in Samara — Kurlina's mansion in Samara. The facade is finished with blue and emerald tiles. The forged roof railing in the form of butterfly wings lends a sense of lightness. The wave line characteristic of Art Nouveau can be read in the gables and in the rounded entrance and balcony arch.

Over the course of the style's history, several directions of Art Nouveau took shape. In Germany it was called Jugendstil; in Austria, the Secession. There were also Rationalism, Neoclassicism, and even Berlin, Paris, and Riga variants of Art Nouveau. The style held sway for a quarter of a century before being replaced by Expressionism and Functionalism.

Practice

If you want your country house to stand out from the rest, decorating it in the Art Nouveau style will be the perfect solution.

Use smooth, flowing lines in the design of the building, like the lines seen in the surrounding landscape. Avoid sharp corners; favor more scrolls and curves. Whatever its size, the structure should have a visual lightness.
The building materials can be anything — brick, wood, metal. An excellent solution is a combination of different textures: a wooden facade trimmed with rubble stone or red brick. Glass, metal, and iron elements may also dominate the facade finish. Rounded mosaic elements, molding, and statuettes are all appropriate.
Colors — natural and restrained, perhaps with bright accents, but without a hint of pomp.
Windows — always large — can be placed asymmetrically, as can the main entrance.
Balconies and bay windows are offset from the central axis and decorated with columns, possibly in the form of spirals. "Twisted" elements are typical of Art Nouveau house projects — spiral staircases and a special arrangement of the rooms inside.
The surrounding landscape should reinforce the unity of the style. The grounds should include fountains, ponds, a variety of openwork arches and pergolas, and gazebos with stained-glass windows. The layout incorporates sinuous, flowing lines and is dominated by natural stone, wood, and forged elements. The garden should have plenty of open space and a few solitary accents — large trees or group plantings.
Order your facade design from us.