Bozar Centre for Fine Arts
Victor Horta's 1920s arts complex with a celebrated concert hall and large exhibition galleries.
Bozar occupies a sloping site between the Royal Quarter and the lower city, where Victor Horta was asked to build an arts centre that would not block the view from the Royal Palace towards the town hall. His solution buried much of the volume below street level, so the complex reads as a modest Art Deco frontage on Rue Ravenstein while containing concert halls, galleries, a chamber music room and circulation spaces on several levels. The building was completed in the 1920s and remains one of the largest works Horta designed in a stripped classical idiom rather than Art Nouveau.
The Henry Le Boeuf Hall seats around 2,000 and is the home of the National Orchestra of Belgium and the venue for the finals of the Queen Elisabeth Competition. Alongside music, Bozar programmes large temporary exhibitions of visual art, architecture and photography, film screenings through its cinema, literature and debate. The institution is federally funded and works with museums and collections across Europe, presenting several major shows each season in galleries arranged around the building's long top-lit halls.
Highlights
- Henry Le Boeuf Hall, a 2,000-seat concert hall known for its acoustics
- Horta's Art Deco interiors of marble, glass brick and brass
- Home of the finals of the Queen Elisabeth Competition
- Large temporary exhibitions of art, architecture and photography
