Velde, Henri van de

Velde, Henri van de (äNrē` väN də vĕld), 1863–1957, Belgian designer and architect. Beginning as a painter, critic, and crafts designer in Belgium and in France, he received his first great acclaim for the interiors that he exhibited at Dresden in 1897. Van de Velde played a leading role in the development of Jugendstil, the German equivalent of art nouveau. His designs for furniture and tableware are of especially high quality. With ideas deriving in part from Ruskin and William Morris, he taught at his own school, the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. Van de Velde's architectural activity was considerable. His best work is found in his own house near Brussels (1895) and in the studio building for his school at Weimar (1906), but his architecture never had the quality, importance, or influence of his crafts and his numerous writings. His first book was Die Renaissance im modernen Kunstgewerbe (1901).

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Velde, Henri van de

(born April 3, 1863, Antwerp, Belg.—died Oct. 25, 1957, Zürich, Switz.) Belgian architect, designer, and teacher. Sharing the philosophy of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, van de Velde believed in creating beautiful everyday objects. Increasingly occupied by a philosophy of total design, in 1895 he designed Bloemenwerf, a house for his wife and himself outside of Brussels for which he also designed all the interiors and furnishings. In 1896 he designed furniture and interiors for the Paris art galleries of Samuel Bing; because of the curving, delicate nature of these designs, van de Velde is credited with bringing the Art Nouveau style to Paris. (Van de Velde himself is generally associated with the Jugendstil movement, which was the German branch of Art Nouveau design.) In Weimer in 1902 he reorganized the arts and crafts school and the academy of fine art and thus laid the foundations for the amalgamation of the two bodies into the Bauhaus in 1919. He designed his best-known structure, the curving, sinuous Werkbund Theatre in Cologne, in 1914. His later work includes the Belgian pavilions at the international exhibitions in Paris (1937) and New York (1939). He also created graphic design work, generally in the curvilinear Art Nouveau style, and he spread his ideas through lecturing and teaching.