Centre for Fine Arts

Victor Horta spent seven years on the Centre for Fine Arts, and the difficulty was the site — a slope below the royal quarter, where nothing was allowed to rise high enough to spoil the view from the palace. His answer was to sink the building. Construction began in 1923; the first exhibitions opened in May 1928, the chamber music hall that November, and the Henry Le Bœuf Hall in October 1929. That hall — horseshoe-shaped, built in reinforced concrete, seating some 2,200, with the acoustician Gustave Lyon consulted on the final design — is the foremost concert room in Belgium. The Belgian National Orchestra has been resident since 1936, and the finals of the Queen Elisabeth Competition are heard there. Horta worked here in a stripped, geometric idiom far from the Art Nouveau that made his name. A restoration begun in 2004 recovered much of the original plan; after a fire in 2021 the building was repaired again and reopened in 2023.