The Fantastic Architecture of Alban Chambon
First a manual worker, then industrial artist who trained at Parisian decoration companies in the 1860s, Alban Chambon went on to become an architect of renowned talent, honoured with commissions from Brussels, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris and Ostend.
In Paris, the Ranelagh theatre, the sole remaining element of a vast property, and, in Brussels, the now listed salons at the Metropole hotel, bear witness to his prodigious talent.
The exhibition traces the rise and fall of a man predestined by neither birth nor training to be the inventor of a new architecture that he undoubtedly became.
Working outside of the mainstream, his work bears the mark of brilliance. He is the architect of the music hall and of the fantastic, his world a place of fantasy and enchantment with all the mischievousness of a Jules Verne, a Georges Méliès or a Max Linder.