Edmond van Eetvelde ran the day-to-day administration of Leopold II's Congo Free State from Brussels, and asked Horta for a house that could double as an office for receiving colonial business alongside family life. Horta answered by hollowing the plan around an octagonal rotunda, its ring of slender cast-iron columns rising unsupported by any masonry wall to a stained-glass cupola three storeys up; the whole street facade is hung from a steel frame rather than carried on it, so the window bays step forward past the structural line in a way solid brick or stone construction could never allow. Built in two campaigns, 1895–98 and 1898–1901, it was Horta's most technically daring town house and one of the earliest Brussels facades to trust steel and glass over masonry for its public face. It has been in continuous private office use since the twentieth century and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 alongside Hôtel Tassel, Hôtel Solvay and Horta's own house as the "Major Town Houses of Victor Horta".
Edmond van Eetvelde was general administrator of foreign affairs for the Congo Free State from 1885, and in practice ran its administration in Brussels on Leopold II's behalf: when two fellow administrators resigned in 1890 in protest at the king's decision to impose a state monopoly on ivory and rubber, van Eetvelde stayed on and absorbed their responsibilities too, remaining in post until 1900 and later serving as the Congo Free State's Minister of State from 1901. His tenure therefore spans the years in which forced rubber collection under that monopoly became the documented atrocity that eventually forced Leopold to cede the territory to Belgium in 1908. The house he commissioned from Horta was funded by a fortune built on that administration.
Wikidata Q1818182 · Commons: Belgique - Bruxelles - Hôtel Van Eetvelde - 01.jpg · Photo: EmDee · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0