Brussels Transforms Horta Facade into Skills Centre

Brussels (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – The demolished facade of Victor Horta’s Hôtel Aubecq in Brussels will be rebuilt as a construction training centre, uniting heritage and vocational education.

More than 600 of the Art Nouveau façade’s stones are now kept in a Neder-over-Heembeek depot, and it should serve as an inspiration for next architects and renovators.

Victor Horta created the Hôtel Aubecq, a home on the Avenue Louise in Brussels, Belgium, for Octave Aubecq, an industrialist and lawyer. ‘Le Creuset’ is a well-known cooking pot brand that was founded in part by Aubecq. In 1899, the building was officially opened, but in 1950, Aubecq’s son sold it.

Modernity dominated Brussels at the time, and fresh architecture was displacing the classical Art Nouveau structures.

A former Horta employee salvaged the façade by disassembling it piece by piece and persuading the competent minister to store the pieces in depots. Following Horta’s death in 1947, Jean Delhaye gained notoriety as the strongest advocate for his work.

Delhaye salvaged the facade, and since then, the piece of history has traveled through warehouses and depots in Brussels for seven decades. Rebuilding the facade was always the plan, even if it meant building a corner house across from the current Musical Instruments Museum on the Kunstberg in the center of Brussels. The plans were never implemented, and the stones were moved to a different depot multiple times.

Only with this final, eighth stone relocation is there hope for the future: the facade will be fully restored in the upcoming years as part of the Sint-Agatha-Berchem Heritage Network. Given their unique character, the Brussels Region has long aimed to make all of the Hôtel Aubecq’s remnants publicly available through urban.brussels. 

Following a round table discussion on improving the Hôtel Aubecq’s facade in March 2024, representatives of the construction industry brought up an intriguing opportunity and brought up the construction industry training center project that is presently being built on a site in Sint-Agatha-Berchem.

A training center for construction and heritage professions is presently being developed by Constructiv, the Belgian fund for the building industry. The center will be housed in a collection of buildings on Bigardstraat.

The bricks ought to have been moved from the Neder-over-Heembeek urban.brussels depot to their new location by the beginning of July. The façade will be reconstructed there in stages, initially in a supine position and then in an upright position.

“75 years after the demolition of the Hôtel Aubecq and 25 years after the transfer of ownership of the façade to the Brussels Region, we are delighted to have the opportunity to highlight this unique heritage through a close partnership with the construction sector,” says Sarah Lagrillière, deputy director of urban.brussels.

“Thanks to this public-private partnership, we are preserving the history of this remarkable façade designed by Horta and encouraging young people to choose a career in heritage conservation or restoration,” concludes Ans Persoons (Vooruit), Brussels Secretary of State for Urban Development and Heritage.

What techniques will be used to rebuild the Hôtel Aubecq façade?

Structured light 3D scanning technology has been used to inventory and scan all 600 of the original stones from the façade. Prior to reconstruction, this procedure creates a digital archive of the fragments by precisely capturing texture details and geometric data.

In order to rebuild the façade layer by layer, the stones have been physically rebuilt horizontally on pallets at a warehouse. This enables artisans to examine the initial configuration and state of every stone prior to vertical reconstruction.

Using software