Velde, Henry Clemens Van de

Born Apr. 3, 1863, in Antwerp; died Oct. 25, 1957, in Zürich. Belgian architect and decorative artist.

Velde attended the Academy of Art in Antwerp from 1881 to 1883 and studied painting and drawing. He was one of the founders of the Deutscher Werkbund (1907). In his early period his furniture designing (from 1894 onward), his interior designing (Folkwang Museum in Hagen, Germany, 1901-02), and his architectural work (the Bloemenwerf house in Brussels, 1895) were among the first expressions of art nouveau, making use of curvilinear forms and decoration. Later, as an architect (Weimar School of Applied Arts, 1904; the Werkbund Theater in Cologne, 1914) and theoretician, he became one of the founders and leaders of rationalism. From 1902 to 1914 he was director of the Weimar School of Applied Arts, and from 1926 of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts Decoratifs in Brussels. In his later work—the library in Ghent (1935-40) and the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo in the Netherlands (1938-54)—he made use of the principles of functionalism.