Solvay SA

This is the Baronet Works in Warrington on the bank of the Manchester Ship Canal. Belgian multi-national chemical company, Solvay is the operator and manufactures industrial polymers on the site. Since the foundation of the business in 1863 it has grown into a company employing 29,000 people in 55 countries. Despite the affinity between Solvay and solvent, the name derives from the founder, Ernest Solvay. Which opens up an unlikely connection between the complex utilitarian manufacturing structures on the canal-side and the refined Art Nouveau aesthetic to be found in the buildings of Avenue Louise in Brussels. Ernest Solvay’s son, Armand is the link – in 1894 he commissioned Belgian architect, Victor Horta to design a large Art Nouveau town house on the fashionable Avenue Louise. No expense was spared in terms of construction materials and interior decoration and after two years of building work it was completed as Hôtel Solvay in 1900. Generally regarded as one of the great exemplars of Art Nouveau architecture at its short-lived zenith, Hôtel Solvay has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It could be argued that the exquisite refinement of Horta’s design practice which extended into every aspect of the furnishings, fixtures and fittings has its equivalent in the elaborate computations and formulations that dictate the extraordinary complexity of shapes, forms and volumes required to serve the chemical industry. While environmental concerns proliferate around the production of volatile chemical substances, there is no escaping their ubiquity in our lives as consumers and in the absence of a clear path to an additive-free existence most of us make compromises. Which leaves space to admire the design ingenuity embodied in the industrial process without becoming a cheer-leader for environmentally unsustainable activities. In the same way, an admiration for the beautifully finished craftwork in rare tropical hardwoods in Horta’s interior is not an endorsement of the unregulated exploitation of finite natural resources. 

Musée Horta

Victor Horta designed and built his own home and studio at 25 rue Américaine in the commune of Saint-Gilles, about 2 miles south of the centre of Brussels. Construction took place between 1898 and 1901 and the house was extended in 1906 and 1908. Positioned on a double width plot, Horta divided the space vertically to separate living accommodation and studio and business space. Horta’s talent for exuberant decoration was more than equalled by his command of spatial organisation, seen at its best in the separation of rooms around the central staircase by minor but defining changes in levels of two, three or four steps. These subtleties enable the spatial flow to match the flowing forms that coil and twist throughout the house. The visual language of Art Nouveau perished instantly in the mechanised slaughter of the Great War and when Horta moved out in 1919 to a town-house on avenue Louise, he left behind what was already an extraordinary anachronism. He adapted to the times and developed an architecture of geometric sobriety that brought some prestigious projects (Palais des Beaux-Arts and Brussels-Central railway station) that resulted in worthy but unmemorable buildings. With the ascendancy of Modernism, the rising execration of the style of his early maturity was something Horta had to endure until his death in 1947, some two decades before the rehabilitation of Art Nouveau as part of a new narrative of architectural and design history.


Horta’s house is now a national monument and a significant part of it is curated and open to the public. Visiting is a strange experience. Modern museums are not unreasonably, generally unwelcoming to backpacks and large bags, requiring them to be deposited in cloakrooms. But the Musée Horta has extended this to include virtually all hand held bags including handbags of purse-like dimensions. The result is an enormous cloakroom queue held up by protesting visitors, mainly female, angrily transferring cash, cards and valuables to their person before consigning their handbags into the custody of museum staff in whom they have absolutely no trust. Admission tickets are sold by a functionary perched halfway up the stairs at a tiny table while members of staff self-importantly bustle around continually creating unwanted turbulence in the confined spaces. A ban on photography is rigorously enforced which does induce caution on the part of those unwilling to comply.


None of this makes for a contemplative experience but nevertheless it is fascinating to explore a space that offers such a total design experience where almost every feature has been subordinated to the designer’s brief. Movement around the stairwell and through the rooms is a genuine visual and physical pleasure, greatly enhanced by the flow of forms that gather and surge throughout the building. Almost every feature bears examination for its formal ingenuity and visitors can be seen staring intently at banisters, tie-rods, light pendants, matchbox holders and keyholes, all specially designed and custom-built. Horta’s vision was unusually intense and triggered an explosion of Art Nouveau architectural exuberance across Europe and North America and in doing so boosted the first 20th. century art movement to explode into life and expire in little more than a decade, pioneering a tradition of rapid transience that shows no sign of changing.