From “meaningful noises” to Synecdoches: The Fragments of Victor Horta’s Hôtel Aubecq in Brussels

This article aims to take Brandi’s principle – linked to the view of the work of art as a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts – as a starting point for examining the case of the fragments of the Hôtel Aubecq.
From the 1960s onwards, plans were drawn up for the reuse of its remains. Until a few years ago, the solutions proposed for their enhancement were in line with Brandi’s observations and regarded these fragments as ruins outside the arrangement intended by Horta.
But the installation implemented for the 2018–19 exhibition prompted a different aesthetic perspective. Rather than a reminder of the entire composition, each fragment seemed to constitute a true synecdoche, in the sense of ‘a word or phrase in which a part of something is used to refer to the whole of it’. This solution appears capable of “restoring the potential unity, without committing artistic or historical falsifications, and without erasing every trace of [its] passage through time”.