While I was in Brussels, I visited the Comics Art Museum. The collection was enjoyable and it’s hard not to like a museum that encourages picture-taking, but it was the buildingthat grabbed me. It was designed by Victor Horta, one of the greats of Art Nouveau architecture, as a warehouse. It features exposed and ornamented steel beams, cast iron columns, steel columns, combined steel-and-cast-iron columns, handrails, glass vaults, concrete vaults, stone stairs, and so on and so on and so on. There is an enormous amount of highly-designed structure for a relatively small building.
The building is so attention-grabbing that it would probably not work well as a museum for staid art; fortunately, comics are cable of grabbing your attention back. Here are a few pictures to give a sense of it:
You must be logged in to post a comment.