Art Nouveau architecture: how to recognize it, and where it grew

Art Nouveau architecture is the “new art” of the years around 1900. Architects in Brussels, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Glasgow and Riga tried to break with copied historic styles by taking their lines from plants, flowers and sea creatures. This guide covers the period, how to spot the style on a street, what it was called in each country, and how it differs from Art Deco.

What is Art Nouveau architecture?

Art Nouveau is a design movement that covered painting, posters, jewelry, glass, ceramics, furniture and buildings. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) describes a style drawn from the natural world, full of delicate tendrils, organic forms and sweeping, swirling lines, and notes that some see it as the first conscious attempt to invent a modern style.

In buildings, that meant a few big changes:

• Structure and decoration merge. The V&A counts the merging of structure and ornament among the traits the style shared across countries. Victor Horta and Hector Guimard molded iron pillars, beams, banisters and grilles into curving, organic shapes instead of hiding the frame behind classical columns and moldings.
• New materials are put on show. Iron was still a fairly new building material in the second half of the 19th century, the V&A notes. Horta and Guimard left it exposed and shaped it.
• Every detail belongs to one design. The V&A calls Horta’s Hôtel Tassel and Hôtel van Eetvelde total works of art, with organic decoration running from the iron banisters and stained-glass canopies down to the door handles.

For where Art Nouveau sits among other movements, see our overview of types of architecture.

When was Art Nouveau architecture popular?

The V&A dates Art Nouveau from the early 1890s to the First World War. A rough timeline:

According to the V&A, the popularity of the name itself is said to stem from the Paris gallery of the art dealer Siegfried Bing, the Maison de L’Art Nouveau.

How do you identify Art Nouveau architecture?

Run through this list when you look at a facade or a photo of one. Two or three of these features together are a strong sign.

1. Whiplash curves. The V&A defines the whiplash as “an ornamental S-curve that writhes and coils.” Look for it in balcony railings, gates, stair balusters and door grilles.
2. Plant, flower and sea forms. The V&A traces the whiplash to studies of deep-sea organisms and botanical gardens, and lists flowers, leaves, animals and insects among the style’s motifs. They appear in stone, plaster and metal, stylized rather than botanically exact.
3. Exposed, shaped iron. Columns, beams, banisters and grilles are left visible and bent into organic shapes.
4. Stained glass and glazed roofs. Horta used stained-glass canopies, and the Vienna Secession’s main hall sits under tent-like glazed roofs.
5. Asymmetry. The V&A names asymmetrical compositions as one of the style’s common traits. Expect windows of different sizes and an entrance that is not centered.
6. Mosaic and glazed ceramic. Colored tiles and mosaics, as at the Palau de la Música Catalana, or the glazed ceramic and broken-glass cladding of Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona.
7. Curved openings. Window and door heads bend and flare instead of sitting on a plain semicircle or a flat lintel. Casa Batlló, for example, has a large oval window on its main floor.
8. Sculpted faces and figures. Masks and figures are worked into the facade, like the masks the Riga Graduate School of Law describes on the city’s Art Nouveau facades and the three Gorgon masks over the Secession Building’s entrance in Vienna.

What is Art Nouveau called in different countries?

The style spread quickly and picked up a local name in almost every country. The names, and the shop, magazine or group behind them, come from the V&A unless noted.

Mackintosh’s version stands apart. In the V&A’s account, his main contribution to Art Nouveau was to give it order through a strict yet eccentric geometry. That more geometric strand, shared with Josef Hoffmann in Vienna, is the one the V&A links to Art Deco.

Who were the most important Art Nouveau architects?

Victor Horta (Brussels). Europa Nostra calls Horta, together with Hector Guimard, the leading figure of Art Nouveau architecture. Four of his Brussels town houses, the Hôtel Tassel, Hôtel Solvay, Hôtel van Eetvelde and his own Maison & Atelier, have been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2000, according to Europa Nostra. Horta later sold his own house as two residences; the local authority acquired them in 1961 and gradually recombined them into the Horta Museum.

Hector Guimard (Paris). The V&A says Guimard is best known for his metalwork, especially the entrance arches he designed for the Paris Métro, and calls him the greatest architectural practitioner of French Art Nouveau. The museum holds a Guimard desk from about 1895 and a balcony front from about 1900.

Joseph Maria Olbrich (Vienna). Olbrich was barely 30 and an associate in Otto Wagner’s studio when the Secession artists commissioned him. The Secession says the cornerstone of his exhibition building was laid on April 28, 1898, and the building was finished six months later. Its dome carries thousands of gilded wrought-iron laurel leaves.

Antoni Gaudí (Barcelona). The V&A names Gaudí as the foremost figure of the Spanish Modernista movement. Casa Batlló’s own description of the facade lists glazed ceramic cladding in many colors with fragments of broken glass, slender stone columns shaped like bones, and mask-shaped balcony railings, each cast in iron as a single piece.

Lluís Domènech i Montaner (Barcelona). He designed the Palau de la Música Catalana, which its operators call the only concert hall designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Hospital de Sant Pau. At Sant Pau he planned 48 buildings, but only 27 were built. Their pavilions sit in gardens and are linked by underground tunnels.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Glasgow). The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society calls the Glasgow School of Art his masterwork and says Mackintosh is still regarded as the father of the Glasgow Style. Lack of money meant the school was built in two phases.

Mikhail Eisenstein (Riga). Father of the film director Sergei Eisenstein, he designed several richly decorated apartment houses on Alberta iela and nearby Elizabetes iela. The Riga Graduate School of Law calls its building at No. 13 the finest example of Riga’s Art Nouveau and describes the period’s facades as stylized flowers, masks with varied expressions, sculpted figures and tangles of waving curves.

Several of these appear in our list of famous buildings.

What is the difference between Art Nouveau and Art Deco?

The two get confused because both are decorative, both names begin with “Art,” and one came straight after the other. They look very different.

Dates and names for both columns come from the V&A. The museum also traces a line from one to the other. Art Deco designers borrowed Art Nouveau’s plant and floral forms and reworked them into stylized patterns, and the more linear, geometric strand of Art Nouveau, seen in Mackintosh and Josef Hoffmann, fed directly into Art Deco.

If you like design that tracks the mood of its era, compare Art Deco’s machine age with the jet-age optimism of Googie architecture in 1950s America.

Why did Art Nouveau end?

The style drew attacks from the start: the V&A notes that critics denounced the exaggerated ornament of Horta and Guimard as excessive, and the Vienna Secession says its own dome was derided as a cabbage head. The V&A also says the whiplash’s appeal wore out quickly. As the First World War approached, opulence and ornament were rejected in favor of sleeker, mass-produced forms, and modernism began to take its place. The style’s more geometric strand, seen in Vienna and Glasgow, lived on in Art Deco.

Where can you see Art Nouveau architecture today?

• Brussels: the Horta Museum in Saint-Gilles, plus Horta’s three other UNESCO-listed town houses.
• Vienna: the Secession Building, still run by artists as an exhibition space for contemporary art.
• Barcelona: Casa Batlló and the Palau de la Música Catalana, both open for visits, and Domènech i Montaner’s Sant Pau site, restored as a cultural landmark since its hospital use ended in 2009.
• Glasgow: Mackintosh’s buildings. Check the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society for which are open.
• Riga: Alberta iela 13 and Eisenstein’s other apartment houses on Alberta iela.

Check opening times before you go. Several of these buildings have been through long restorations, and Casa Batlló lists one running from 2018 to 2026.