Horta studied in Ghent and Paris before entering the office of Alphonse Balat, the classicist who built the royal glasshouses at Laeken — an apprenticeship in iron and glass that underwrites everything he did later. From 1892 he produced a run of Brussels town houses for liberal, freemason and scientific clients in which the plan is organised around a top-lit stair hall and exposed iron columns branch into painted tendrils. He carried the same language into the Maison du Peuple for the Belgian Workers' Party and into department stores, then turned severe after 1918: the Centre for Fine Arts and Brussels Central Station are stripped and classical. He directed the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts, was made a baron in 1932, and lived long enough to watch his Art Nouveau go out of fashion.
