Chapter 7

    Architects and Designers

7.1 While various poets, philosophers, writers and artists had begun, during the past hundred years or so, to celebrate the wonders to be found in the Natural world and so cultivate a sensibility to Nature’s beauty in the general population, it was designers and architects who set out to bring this Beauty into people’s homes. Perhaps the first was

William Morris (1834 – 1896), an English textile designer, poet (he was offered to be Poet Laureate after the death of Tennyson, but declined) novelist and socialist activist. During the mid nineteenth century, he was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production.

7.2 From 1871 Morris rented the rural retreat of Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire and in 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press to publish limited-edition, illuminated-style print books, a cause to which he devoted his final years. Morris is recognised as one of the most significant cultural figures of Victorian England, and though best known in his lifetime as a poet, he posthumously became better known for his designs and much of his work can be found in art galleries and museums, and his designs are still in production, designs which to this day bring the beauty of nature into people’s homes throughout the world.

7.3 Morris decried the ugliness of the newly industrialised world into which people were being plunged, not only for the deplorable conditions its workers endured, but also for the shabbiness of mass produced goods, and the grimy cities and dingy houses where the beauty of nature was nowhere to be seen.

“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization”.

His revival of pre-industrial manufacturing methods for his textiles and the creation of beautiful designs featuring drawn from sinuously winding plants, colourful flowers and trees, was his protest at the world introduced by Richard Arkwright, James Watt and the Industrial Revolution (see Economy).

    William Morris textile design

7.4 Morris took great interest in the process of textile dyeing and entered into a co-operative agreement with Thomas Wardle, a silk dyer who operated the Hencroft Works in Leek, Staffordshire. As a result, Morris would spend time with Wardle at his home on various occasions between summer 1875 and spring 1878. Deeming the colours to be of inferior quality, Morris rejected the chemical aniline dyes which were then predominant, instead emphasising the revival of organic dyes, such as indigo for blue, walnut shells and roots for brown, and cochineal, kermes, and madder for red. Living and working in this industrial environment, he gained a personal understanding of production and the lives of the proletariat, and was disgusted by the poor living conditions of workers and the pollution caused by industry; these factors greatly influenced his political views. After learning the skills of dyeing, in the late 1870s Morris turned his attention to weaving, experimenting with silk weaving at Queen's Square. In doing so he was competing in his own small way with the great silk manufacturing centre of Lyon.

“With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on.”

7.5 William Morris pioneered the way for a new form of art which was to emerge towards the last years of his life.

“If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Ideas such as these inspired a generation of artists, designers, architects, and makers of furniture, glass, and ceramics.

7.6 A second major influence on the Art Nouveau movement was a man as far removed from Morris’s radical socialist ideals as could be imagined. In his Ontology and Phylogeny Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote: Haeckel’s “evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a "just" state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others . . . all contributed to the rise of Nazism."

7.7 However, Haeckel was a skilled and dedicate zoologist and an excellent painter to boot. He combined these skills, together with his vision (shared as we have seen with Brian Moss, that the small creatures of the planet, “the scene-shifters” play an enormously important role in our lives about which most people are entirely unaware.

7.8 Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834 – 9 August 1919) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany.

7.9 So far, so good. However, he also developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny. This was demonstrably untrue but nevertheless he promoted the idea to his students, a fraud for which the scientific community does not now forgive him.

7.10 Nevertheless, we are talking about Art Nouveau, and not the rise of Nazi ideology or misguided interpretations of evolutionary science, and this is where his great work comes in. Haeckel’s great artwork “Kunstformen der Natur, "Art Forms of Nature", published in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904 and collectively in two volumes in 1904, i.e. contemporaneously with the rise of Art Nouveau, includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures. According to Haeckel scholar Olaf Breidbach, the work was "not just a book of illustrations but also the summation of his view of the world." The over-riding themes of the Kunstformen plates are symmetry and organization. The subjects were selected to embody organization, from the scale patterns of boxfishes to the spirals of ammonites to the perfect symmetries of jellies and microorganisms, while images composing each plate are arranged for maximum visual impact. Among the notable prints are numerous radiolarians (creatures not dissimilar to the diatoms discussed elsewhere (see limology – diatoms), which Haeckel helped to popularize among amateur microscopists; at least one example is found in almost every set of 10.

7.11 Kunstformen der Natur was influential in early 20th-century art, architecture, and design, bridging the gap between science and art. In particular, many artists associated with Art Nouveau were influenced by Haeckel's images, including René Binet, Karl Blossfeldt, Hans Christiansen, and Émile Gallé. One prominent example is the Amsterdam Commodities Exchange designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage: it was in part inspired by Kunstformen illustrations.

7.12 The origins of Art Nouveau are found in the resistance of the artist William Morris to the cluttered compositions and the revival tendencies of the 19th century and his theories that helped initiate the Arts and crafts movement. However, Arthur Mackmurdo's book-cover for Wren's City Churches (1883), with its rhythmic floral patterns, is often considered the first realisation of Art Nouveau. About the same time, the flat perspective and strong colours of Japanese wood block prints, especially those of Katsushika Hokusai, had a strong effect on the formulation of Art Nouveau, particularly with the work of the Scot Rennie Mackintosh. The Japonisme that was popular in Europe during the 1880s and 1890s was particularly influential on many artists with its organic forms and references to the natural world.

7.13 Art Nouveau became an international style of art, architecture and applied art, especially the decorative arts, that was most popular between 1890 and 1910. A reaction to the academic art of the 19th century, it was inspired by natural forms and structures, not only in flowers and plants, but also in curved lines.

7.14 Maison de l'Art Nouveau (House of New Art) was the name of the gallery initiated in 1895 by the Franco-German art dealer Siegfried Bing in Paris that featured exclusively modern art. The fame of his gallery was increased at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, where he presented coordinated—in design and colour—installations of modern furniture, tapestries and objets d'art. These decorative displays became so strongly associated with the style that the name of his gallery subsequently provided a commonly used term for the entire style. Thus the term "Art Nouveau" was created.

7.15 Art Nouveau is considered a "total" art style, embracing architecture, graphic art, interior design, and most of the decorative arts including jewellery, furniture, textiles, household silver and other utensils, and lighting, as well as the fine arts. According to the philosophy of the style, art should be a way of life. For many well-off Europeans, it was possible to live in an art nouveau-inspired house with art nouveau furniture, silverware, fabrics, ceramics including tableware, jewellery, cigarette cases, etc. Artists desired to combine the fine arts and applied arts, even for utilitarian objects.

7.16 Art Nouveau architecture was expressed through decoration; the buildings were covered with ornament in curving forms, often based on flowers, plants or animals; on butterflies, peacocks, swans, irises, cyclamens, orchids and water lilies. Facades were asymmetrical, and often decorated with polychrome ceramic tiles. The decoration often suggested movement; there was no distinction between the structure and the ornament.

7.17 The style first appeared in Brussels the Hotel Tassel (1894) and Hotel Solvay (1900) of Victor Horta. The Hotel Tassel was visited by Hector Guimard, who used the same style in his first major work, the Castel Beranger (1897–98). In all of these houses, the architects also designed the furniture and the interior decoration, down to the doorknobs and carpeting. In 1899, based on the fame of the Castel Beranger, Guimard received a commission to design the entrances of the stations of the new Paris Metro, which opened in 1900. Though few of the originals survived, These became the symbol of the art nouveau movement in Paris.

7.18 In Paris, the architectural style was also a reaction to the strict regulations imposed on building facades by Georges-Eugene Haussmann, the prefect of Paris under Napoleon III. Bow windows were finally allowed in 1903. and Art nouveau architects went to the opposite extreme, most notably in the houses of Jules Lavirotte, which were essentially large works of sculpture, completely covered with decoration. An important neighborhood of Art Nouveau houses appeared in the French city of Nancy, around the Villa Majorelle (1901–02) the home of furniture designer Louis Majorelle. It was designed by Henri Sauvage as a showcase for Majorelle's furniture designs.[25]

7.19 The architectural style spread from Belgium and France to Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Spain and the rest of Europe, taking on different name and character in each country. It reached its peak in 1910, and by the beginning of the First World War it was virtually finished; a new style, Art Deco, took its place.

7.20 Architects who designed both the house and furniture included Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Antoni Gaudí, Hector Guimard, Henri van de Velde, Josef Hoffmann, and Victor Horta. Mackintosh's furniture was relatively austere and geometrical, marked by elongated dimensions and right-angles. Continental designs were much more elaborate, often using curved shapes both in the basic shapes of the piece, and in applied decorative motifs. In many ways the old vocabulary and techniques of classic French 18th-century Rococo furniture were re-interpreted in a new style.

7.21 The École de Nancy (School of Nancy in France), the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna and the Deutscher Werkbund were groupings including many designers of Art Nouveau furniture. The Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1900 was an important showcase for designers. Hector Guimard (1867-1942), inspired by a meeting with Victor Horta in Brussels, built the Castel Béranger, the first building in Paris in the new style, between 1895 and 1898. In 1898 the Paris city government, responding to criticism that the identical facades of the buildings lining the boulevards built by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were dull and monotonous, organized a competition for the most original new facade design. The Castel Béranger was a winner in the competition, making Guimard immediately famous. In 1900, Guimard was chosen, over the wishes of the official jury, by baron Edouard Empain, engineer and financier of the construction of the new Paris Metro, to design the entrances of the new stations of the Paris Metro. The entrances were criticized as the “noodle style” by some, but the metro entrances became the symbol of the Art Nouveau in Paris. The most important centre in Britain eventually became Glasgow, with the creations of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Four, pre-eminent members of the so-called Glasgow School, which included his wife Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, who produced outstanding paintings.

7.22 High on a hill in Helensburgh, overlooking the River Clyde, sits what is universally regarded as Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s finest domestic creation. The Hill House is a visually arresting mix of Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Scottish Baronial and Japonisme architecture and design. Mackintosh designed nearly everything inside the Hill House too, from the decorative schemes and the furniture to the fittings and contents. His wife, Margaret Macdonald, designed and made many of the textiles as well as a beautiful fireplace panel. Much of the house has been restored so it looks almost exactly as it did in 1904 when its first residents, Glasgow publisher Walter Blackie and his family, moved in. The beautiful, formal gardens have also been restored in line with the early designs, using plants that would have been available at the time. And so Rennie Mackintosh fulfilled with style William Morris’s dictum: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”.

7.23 And so it was that the efforts of this generation of creative architects, designers and textile makers, continued along the path set out by poets, philosophers, writers and artists before them, further sensitizing the general public to the beauty of Nature.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

    Hill house

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