Henri Clemens van de Velde (1863-1957), the famous Belgian architect and designer, was one of the most successful and important practitioners of the Art Nouveau style. He sought to instill in architecture and the applied arts the notion that materials must be used only as appropriate to their inherent properties.
He began his career as a painter but in 1895 turned to decorative arts, design, and architecture. Inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris, he rebelled against the moribund styles of Victorian Revival architecture and industrial design.
His own house at Ukkel (1895, near Brussels) was an early Art Nouveau landmark. His difficulty in finding suitable furnishings for it led him to design his own furniture, his intent being to raise the applied arts to the status of the fine arts.
Van de Velde's success led to commissions for other houses, mainly in Germany, in which the architecture and furnishings - all incorporating sweeping Art Nouveau curves - were closely integrated.
The fullest expressions of his style were found in a Paris shop, Maison de l'Art Nouveau (1896), and in the Folkwang Museum (1902) in Hagen, Germany. As a founder of art schools in Germany and Belgium - his Weimar School of Arts and Crafts (1907) later became the celebrated Bauhaus - van de Velde was the most influential of Art Nouveau architects.
Van de Velde and his followers staged the famous Cologne Werkbund Exhibition of 1914, the first European statement of the coming wave of Modern Architecture.