Art Nouveau architecture

Art Nouveau was an international style of architecture and the decorative arts that flourished from about 1890 to 1910. It broke with the historicism of the nineteenth century by taking its forms from nature: winding plant motifs, flowing asymmetric lines, and handcrafted detail. The French name comes from Maison de l’Art Nouveau, the Paris gallery Siegfried Bing opened in 1895; in Germany, the Nordic countries and the Baltics the style goes by Jugendstil, or simply jugend, after the Munich magazine Die Jugend.

On the street you recognize it by sinuous whiplash curves, asymmetry, and stylized ornament of leaves, flowers and tendrils. New materials carried the look: iron, glass and ceramics, later concrete, let architects open up larger and lighter rooms behind the undulating facades.

The architectural breakthrough came in Brussels, where Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel (1892-1893) stands as one of the style’s first landmarks. Hector Guimard’s canopied entrances for the Paris Métro brought the style to millions, and the Paris world’s fair of 1900, with nearly fifty million visitors, marked its high point. Vienna’s Secession, led by Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann, pushed the vocabulary toward geometric precision, while in Riga roughly a third of the city center was built in the style, most of it 1904-1914, the highest concentration in the world.

World War I ended the movement: by 1914 Art Nouveau was largely exhausted, and Art Deco and modernism took its place. Today the surviving buildings carry high heritage value, and the historic center of Riga holds UNESCO World Heritage status with its Art Nouveau ensembles as a core part of that listing.