Stoclet Palace

Stoclet Palace
Palais Stoclet (French) Stocletpaleis (Dutch)
The Stoclet Palace seen from the Avenue de Tervueren/Tervurenlaan
Alternative names	Stoclet House
General information
Type	Private house
Architectural style	Vienna Secession
Address	Avenue de Tervueren / Tervurenlaan 279–281
Town or city	1150 Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Brussels-Capital Region
Country	Belgium
Coordinates	50°50′07″N 4°24′58″E
Construction started	1905 (1905)
Completed	1911 (1911)
Client	Adolphe Stoclet
Owner	Stoclet family
Design and construction
Architect(s)	Josef Hoffmann
Other designers	Gustav Klimt, Franz Metzner, Fernand Khnopff
UNESCO World Heritage Site
Official name	Stoclet House
Type	Cultural
Criteria	i, ii
Designated	2009 (33rd session)
Reference no.	1298
Region	Europe and North America
References

The Stoclet Palace (French: Palais Stoclet [palɛ stɔklɛ]; Dutch: Stocletpaleis [stɔˈklɛːpaːˌlɛis]) is a mansion in Brussels, Belgium. It was designed by the Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann for the Belgian financier Adolphe Stoclet. Built between 1905 and 1911 in the Vienna Secession style, it is located at 279–281, avenue de Tervueren/Tervurenlaan, in the Woluwe-Saint-Pierre municipality of Brussels. Considered Hoffman's masterpiece, the residence is one of the 20th century's most refined and luxurious private houses.

The sumptuous dining and music rooms of the Stoclet Palace exemplified the theatrical spaces of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), celebrating sight, sound, and taste in a symphony of sensual harmonies that paralleled the operas of Richard Wagner, from whom the concept originated. In his designs for the Stoclet Palace, Hoffmann was particularly attuned to fashion and to the Viennese identity of the new style of interior, even designing a dress for Madame Stoclet so that she would not clash with her living room decor as she had while wearing a French Paul Poiret gown.

The mansion is owned by the Stoclet family and is not open to visitors. Until recently no outsider, not even experts helping with restoration were allowed in. The building has received protected status by the Monuments and Sites Directorate of the Brussels-Capital Region, and it was designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in June 2009.

Description

Detail of the preparatory design by Gustav Klimt for the mosaic friezes of the main dining room of the Stoclet Palace (Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna)

The Stoclet Palace was commissioned by Adolphe Stoclet (1871–1949), a wealthy Belgian financier and art collector. He chose 35-year-old Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956), who was a founding member of the Vienna Secession, a radical group of designers and artists established in 1897. Hoffman abandoned fashions and styles of the past and produced a building that is an asymmetrical compilation of rectangular blocks, underlined by exaggerated lines and corners.

The starkness of the exterior is softened by artistic windows, which break through the line of the eaves, the rooftop conservatory, and bronze sculptures of four nude males by Franz Metzner, which are mounted on the tower that rises above the stairwell. Regimented upright balustrades line the balconies, touched with Art Nouveau ornamentation.

The Stoclet Palace was the first residential project for the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops), co-founded by Hoffman in 1903. Josef Hoffman and his colleagues designed every aspect of the mansion, down to the door handles and light fittings. The interior is as austere and at the same time detailed as the exterior, with upright geometrically coordinated furniture and minimal clutter. This was an avant-garde approach, presenting a 'reformed interior' where function dictated form. The interior of the building is decorated with marble paneling and artworks, including large mosaic friezes by painter Gustav Klimt (designed by him and implemented on location by Leopold Forstner) and murals by Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel. The integration of architects, artists, and artisans makes the Stoclet Palace an example of a Gesamtkunstwerk, one of the defining characteristics of Art Nouveau. Klimt's sketches for the dining room are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna.

The Stoclet Palace is located at 279–281, avenue de Tervueren/Tervurenlaan, in the Woluwe-Saint-Pierre municipality of Brussels. The building was designed to appear from the road as a stately city mansion. Seen from the garden at the back the Stoclet Palace "becomes a villa suburbana with its rear façade sculpturally modelled by bay windows, balconies and terraces" in the words of architectural historian Annette Freytag, which gave the Stoclet family a building with "all the advantages of a comfortable urban mansion and a country house at the same time."

Adolphe Stoclet died in 1949, and the mansion was inherited by his daughter-in-law Annie Stoclet. Following Annie's death in 2002, the house was inherited by her four daughters. The Stoclet Palace has never been open to the public. Press reports have described the mansion as being looked after by two caretakers while there is dissension between Stoclet's four granddaughters as to the future of the Stoclet Palace. In 2024, however, the Brussels Parliament approved a motion ordering the opening of the Stoclet Palace to the public for a period of maximum 15 days per year, although it remains unclear when this will be put into practice.

• 
  Windows of the Stoclet Palace
• 
  Detail of the façade, made of reinforced concrete covered with marble plaques
• 
  The cupola
• 
  The dining room, with furniture by Hoffmann and ceramic frieze by Klimt

See also

• Villa Empain
• Art Nouveau in Brussels
• Art Deco in Brussels
• History of Brussels
• Culture of Belgium
• Belgium in the long nineteenth century

References

Bibliography

• "1910-1918 pictures of the Palais Stoclet". Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (in German). German documentation Center for Art History. Retrieved 18 October 2011. Rare collection of 52 B/W pictures from the exterior, the interior and the gardens of the Stoclet Palace taken in the years following the completion of the building.
• Freytag, Anette (2010). "Josef Hoffmann's unknown masterpiece: the garden of Stoclet House in Brussels (1905-1911)". Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. 30 (4): 337–372. doi:10.1080/14601176.2010.485733. ISSN 1460-1176. S2CID 161356977.
• Fletcher, Banister (1996). Sir Banister Fletcher's a History of Architecture (20th ed.). London: Architectural Press. ISBN 978-0-7506-2267-7.
• Honnef, Klaus (2000). Art of the 20th Century. Köln: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-5907-0.
• Natter, Tobias, ed. (2012). Gustav Klimt. Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8365-2795-8.
• Sharp, Dennis (2002). Twentieth Century Architecture. Mulgrave: Images Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-86470-085-5.
• Sembach, Klaus-Jurgen (2002). Art Nouveau. Köln: Taschen. p. 225. ISBN 978-3-8228-2022-3.
• Watkin, David (2005). A History of Western Architecture. London: Laurence King Publishing. ISBN 978-1-85669-459-9.

Further reading

• Dumoulin, Michel (2010). Les Stoclet. Microcosme d'ambitions et de passions (in French). Brussels: Le Cri. ISBN 9782871065654.
• Kurrent, Friedrich; Strobl, Alice (1991). Das Palais Stoclet in Brüssel (in German). Salzburg: Verlag Galerie Welz. ISBN 978-3-85349-162-1.
• Noever, Peter (2006). Yearning for Beauty: the Wiener Werkstätte and the Stoclet House. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers. ISBN 978-3-7757-1778-6.
• Sekler, Eduard F. (1967). Rudolf Wittkower (ed.). The Stoclet House by Joseph Hoffmann. Essays in the History of Architecture. London: Phaidon. OCLC 82161568.
• Sekler, Eduard F. (1985). Josef Hoffmann: the architectural work: monograph and catalogue of works. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-06572-4.
• Klimt, Gustav (2012). Christoph Thun-Hohenstein; Beate Murr (eds.). Gustav Klimt: Erwartung und Erfüllung: Entwürfde zum Mosaikfries im Palais Stoclet [Expectation and fulfillment: cartoons for the mosaic frieze at Stoclet House] (in German and English). Ostfildern: Hatje/Cantz. ISBN 978-3-7757-3305-2.
• Weidinger, Alfred (2011). "100 Years of Palais Stoclet - New Information on the Genesis of Gustav Klimt's Construction and Interior Decoration". In Husslein-Arco, Agnes (ed.). Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffmann. Pioneers of Modernism. Munich: Prestel. pp. 204–251. ISBN 978-3-7913-5149-0.

External links

• Media related to Stoclet Palace at Wikimedia Commons
• "Catalog of images of the Stoclet Palace". Picture Library. Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium's Artistic Heritage. Archived from the original on 31 March 2019. Retrieved 10 January 2009.
• Exhibition of Klimt's work for Stoclet House at MAK.at
• Article and large selection of pictures of the Stoclet Palace